Professor Dr Roberta Sessoli

Research Priorities: Coordination chemistry, molecular magnetism, magnetic resonances, surfaces quantum materials
Roberta Sessoli is an Italian chemistry expert. Working at the interface between chemistry and physics, she has pioneered research into magnetic bistability in molecules and quantum effects in mesoscopic materials, thus opening an entirely new field in magnetism and nanotechnology. Her current interests include the interplay between magnetism and chirality, molecules with highly coherent spin dynamics for quantum information, and magnetic molecules on surfaces to form hybrid interfaces.
At the start of her career, Roberta Sessoli focused primarily on magnetic materials. Her work on low dimensional molecular materials, chains, and clusters, led to the breakthrough discovery that a few paramagnetic metal ions in a molecule can behave like a magnet. These materials, known as single-molecule magnets (SMMs), have opened a completely new field in nanomagnetism, which has become a “school of physics” for the many new fundamental quantum phenomena detected in SMMs. At the same time, the potential of SMMs as ultra-miniaturized magnetic memory units has attracted the interest of many researchers.
Roberta Sessoli has been successively working on the organisation of SMMs on surfaces, which is essential to address the magnetic memory of single molecules. She and her team have shown for the first time that the memory effect can survive when suitably designed molecules are grafted to a gold surface.
Recently she has turned her attention to molecular spin systems with long spin coherence time, which are of interest for quantum information technology. The rational design of molecular qubits she has been developing takes into account not only spin degrees of freedom but also the vibrational properties of the molecules. Roberta Sessoli’s research has focused on the assembly of these molecules, either as crystals or on a surface, to form quantum gates. She is also currently interested in the interplay between magnetism and chirality, in particular as a resource for quantum technologies based on spins.