Portraying entanglement between molecular qubits with four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering

Entanglement is a crucial resource for quantum information processing and its detection and quantification is of paramount importance in many areas of current research. Weakly coupled molecular nanomagnets provide an ideal test bed for investigating entanglement between complex spin systems. However, entanglement in these systems has only been experimentally demonstrated rather indirectly by macroscopic techniques or by fitting trial model Hamiltonians to experimental data. Here we show that four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering enables us to portray entanglement in weakly coupled molecular qubits and to quantify it. We exploit a prototype (Cr 7 Ni) 2 supramolecular dimer as a benchmark to demonstrate the potential of this approach, which allows one to extract the concurrence in eigenstates of a dimer of molecular qubits without diagonalizing its full Hamiltonian. Showing the presence of quantum entanglement in a system means it is beyond a classical description, but this is difficult to do experimentally. Here, the authors show how four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering can quantify entanglement, demonstrating the method on a supramolecular dimer.