Claudia Avalos
New York University, NY·Chemistry·Early-career
Some molecules have electron and nuclear spins, a tiny magnetic property, that can be controlled with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Such molecules could serve as quantum sensors, devices that use spin states to detect magnetic fields, rotation or temperature at very small scales.
- Fields
Chemistry
Physics
- Topics
chromophore-radical dyads
nuclear magnetic resonance
hyperpolarization
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Determine how the structure of chromophore-radical dyads, molecules pairing a light absorber with an unpaired-electron unit, controls the mechanism by which light polarizes the radical's spin, using combined computational and experimental studies.
- Identify how dyad structure affects the transfer of spin polarization from the radical to neighboring nuclear spins, which could boost NMR signals.
- Establish design rules linking spin-spin coupling, magnetic anisotropy, orbital overlap and spin relaxation to the size and sign of polarization, and the magnetic field and temperature conditions where it can be reached.
More about the research
They could also strengthen the signal in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), a widely used method that reads molecular structure from nuclear spins but is limited by weak signals. The question is which molecular structures make spins easy to control with light.
Why it matters
Magnetic resonance methods are widely used in the chemical industry but are limited by weak signals. Molecules that produce strong spin polarization with light could make NMR more sensitive for small samples without cryogens or expensive microwave equipment. The same design principles could guide quantum sensors for gyroscopes, magnetic field detection and nanoscale temperature measurement.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Jeffrey Rinehart
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Make magnetic nanoparticles with set composition and magnetic phase by colloidal synthesis, assemble them into composites, and correlate magnetometry of single particles with the magnetoresistance of the solids.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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