A team of researchers from Penn State and Colorado State has demonstrated how a gold cluster can mimic gaseous, trapped atoms, allowing scientists to take advantage of these spin properties in a system that can be easily scaled up. The researchers show that gold nanoclusters have the same key spin properties as the current state-of-the-art methods for quantum information systems. They can also manipulate an important property called spin polarization in these clusters, which is usually fixed in a material. These clusters can be easily synthesized in relatively large quantities, making this work a promising proof-of-concept that gold clusters could be used to support a variety of quantum applications. An electron’s spin not only influences important chemical reactions but also quantum applications like computation and sensing. The direction an electron spins and its alignment with respect to other electrons in the system can directly impact the accuracy and longevity of quantum information systems. Gold clusters can mimic all the best properties of the trapped gaseous ions with the benefit of scalability. Scientists have heavily studied gold nanostructures for their potential use in optical technology, sensing, therapeutics, and to speed up chemical reactions, but less is known about their magnetic and spin-dependent properties. In the current studies, the researchers specifically explored monolayer-protected clusters, which have a core of gold and are surrounded by other molecules called ligands. The researchers determined the spin polarization of the gold clusters using a similar method used with traditional atoms. The research team plans to explore how different structures within the ligands impact spin polarization and how they could be manipulated to fine tune spin properties. This presents a new frontier in quantum information science, as chemists can use their synthesis skills to design materials with tunable results.