Anderson lands cover of flagship materials journal

Work from Assistant Professor Chris Anderson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, focuses on optically active spin qubits — microscopic quantum building blocks that interact with light — that are shaping the future of quantum sensing, computing and the quantum internet. 

Cover Story: "Engineering and materials design for robust optically active spin qubits," authored by Anderson and Stefania Castelletto of RMIT University. was selected as the cover article of the latest issue of MRS Bulletin, the flagship publication of the Materials Research Society. Anderson is also a co-author of the special impact article, “A unified periodic table of quantum coherence for isotope engineering,” also listed on the cover of the same issue as an "impact" story. 

Why it matters 

• Quantum technologies — from ultra-secure communications to nanoscale biological sensors — depend on finding materials that can reliably host and protect quantum information encoded in the spin of individual electrons. 

• No single perfect qubit exists. Anderson's work maps what properties matter most for each quantum application and charts a path for researchers to design better candidates from scratch. 

• A new periodic table was developed — one where each element’s contribution to disrupting fragile quantum states is evaluated, telling engineers and scientists which elements should be chosen when constructing robust quantum technology.  

The big picture: Inside certain crystals and molecules, individual electrons can be trapped by defects — tiny imperfections in an otherwise perfect atomic lattice. These trapped electrons carry "spin," a quantum property with two distinct states that can serve as the 0s and 1s of a quantum bit, or qubit. 

What makes some of these qubits special is that they also interact with light, absorbing and emitting photons in ways that encode their quantum state. That optical link is a game-changer: it allows qubits to be initialized and read out without the ultralow-temperature hardware normally required, and it enables quantum information to travel over optical fiber — the same infrastructure that already carries the internet. 

The research: Anderson's cover article — which introduces a special issue of the MRS Bulletin where he was a guest editor — reviews the full landscape of materials hosting these optically active qubits, covering diamond, silicon, silicon carbide, two-dimensional materials, and designer molecular systems. 

A central insight: The ideal qubit depends entirely on the job. For quantum sensing — imaging molecules, navigating without GPS, measuring magnetic fields at the nanoscale — room-temperature operation and high optical contrast are essential. Diamond's nitrogen-vacancy center is the gold standard here, already commercialized into scanning quantum microscopes. For quantum communication, the calculus flips: long-distance entanglement requires photons that are spectrally pure, coherent and emitted at telecom wavelengths compatible with fiber networks. 

In the second article, Anderson and colleagues develop a new periodic table that focuses on decoherence — the loss of the quantum state of these spins. Usually, the material that hosts qubits also contains nuclear magnetic moments which are like tiny fluctuating magnets that cause noise on the electron. By isotopically purifying materials, one can choose isotopes with no nuclear magnetic moment. However, not all elements can be purified in this way — either due to difficulties in enriching the isotopes or by the fundamental stability of the nucleus.  
 
As part of the periodic table,  an element’s usefulness for quantum technology is evaluated based on computation of the effect on decoherence. As a result, the first universal “cookbook” for materials hosting spin qubits has been published. 

"What excites me and horrifies me the most is that the design space for these quantum systems is enormous — we have essentially the whole periodic table to choose from, and then all the combination of elements as well. However, with the right combination of computational screening, experimental ingenuity, and proper guidelines we can discover platforms with capabilities haven't even imagined yet." — Assistant Professor Chris Anderson  

The bottom line: The papers frame materials science — not just physics — as the critical bottleneck for quantum technology. Surfaces introduce noise. Nanofabrication degrades coherence. Photonic integration demands thin films of materials. Isotopes determine usefulness. Solving these challenges requires simultaneous advances in synthesis, computational design, and device engineering — exactly the kind of cross-cutting work at the heart of materials science and engineering at Illinois.