Grant: Alliance Grants

While quantum computers look very different from their conventional cousins, they are still often based on a semiconducting chip. This is changing, however, as superconducting materials are starting to be employed to improve performance. Graphite intercalated with selected metals (GICs) has shown promising superconductive behavior. Key to this behavior is the degree of intercalation and structure of the resulting 3-D network. Current methods to explore this intercalation have been limited to materials characterization methods like electron microscopies (tunneling, scanning) that can give an overview of a selected material but only indirect information of explicit binding patterns and degree of intercalation (mass loadings, etc). Computations can provide insight into metal binding patterns but without molecular-level experimental information to go along with it, the results can only be qualitatively linked to GIC properties. This proposal aims to provide that direct link by exploring metal intercalation in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) with mass spectrometry and tandem mass spectrometry.