Dr John Morton is the 2009 recipient of the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize. John is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at St. John's College, Oxford. He has pioneered the application of techniques of magnetic resonance spectroscopy to combinations of electron and nuclear spins to store quantum information for extended times and to manipulate it with exquisite precision. He was able to establish that such systems, including those based on molecular materials, are viable for a quantum nanotechnology.
Summary of achievements :
John’s research has established that molecular materials are viable for building quantum computers. His D.Phil demonstrated proof-of-principle experiments on molecular quantum bits and the remarkable spin properties of the endohedral fullerene family of materials in pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), concluding with a demonstration of an error-protecting protocol within a fullerene using two-qubit gates between electron and nuclear spins. Since his D.Phil, he has proposed and demonstrated major improvements of widely-used electron-nucleus double resonance spectroscopic techniques and helped develop a robust model for graph state quantum computation. He has demonstrated how spin-NOON states can be used for enhanced sensing of magnetic fields. Highlights include the longest coherence time measured for a molecular electron spin, the first time-resolved EPR measurements on a molecular magnet, the first observation of an endohedral ion which is directly excitable both by EPR and optical techniques, and the first solid state transfer of quantum coherence from an electron spin to a nuclear spin, and back again. The last of these will enable the study of nuclear spin relaxation in dilute systems with electron spins, which lie beyond the scope of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, and establishes solid state quantum memories offering a ratio of coherence time to single-qubit gate operation time exceeding 107.
Professor George Pickett of Lancaster University, chairman of the committee of senior scientists who assess the nominations, commented: “ We decided to award the prize to Dr Morton not only for the wide range of novel experiments which he has undertaken but also that he has achieved so much at a very early stage in his career. “