QMol is a £7M, five-year project, funded by the EPSRC. It is led by Professor Colin Lambert alongside Professor Benjamin Robinson and Dr Samuel Jarvis and a world leading team of scientists from Oxford University, University of Liverpool, Imperial College London, and the STFC Central Laser Facility, to develop radically new organic materials for everything from smart textiles to self-powered patches for healthcare.

QMol will realise a new generation of switchable organic/organometallic compounds, with the potential to fulfil societal needs for flexible energy harvesting materials, low-power neuromorphic computing, smart textiles and self-powered patches for healthcare. The possibility of creating these exciting materials derives from a series of world firsts by the investigators which demonstrate that advantageous room-temperature quantum interference effects can be scaled up from single molecules to self-assembled monolayers by using new strategies for controlling molecular conformation and energy levels with new methods of molecular assembly which can then be deployed in printed scalable architectures.

For more details see the QMol website.

MemOD is a £2.1M EPSRC Project led by Professor Benjamin Robinson in collaboration with Professor Colin Lambert at Lancaster, Professor Christopher Ford of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge and Professor Martin Bryce of the Department of Chemistry, University of Durham.

The aim of the MemOD project is to demonstrate a new class of high-performance memristive devices formed from ordered, self-assembled molecular multilayers of novel organometallic components, in contact with scalable, CMOS-compatible electrodes. Our vision is to make the next step change towards new technologies for faster, more powerful and more energy-efficient computing architectures.

Mesophone is a six-year €2.7M project funded by the ERC and led by professor Edward Laird to explore mesoscopic quantum effects using carbon nanotubes. The mesoscopic scale spans the boundary between the macroscopic and microscopic realms, where classical and quantum physics hold sway, respectively. Many fascinating quantum phenomena can emerge at the mesoscopic scale. The EU-funded MesoPhone project will use vibrating carbon nanotubes to probe quantum phenomena at the mesoscopic scale. Nanotubes are ideal for experimental investigations in this region as they can be isolated from thermal noise and be deflected by tiny forces. Moreover, because of their small size, their behaviour is significantly affected by quantum jitter. The project's results could help resolve longstanding questions in physics, such as whether a moving object that contains millions of particles could exist in a superposition of states.