2025 Hamilton Award: Achieving the impossible with benzene a huge leap forward for quantum technologies
The Hamilton Award for an early-career researcher for excellence in scientific research has been presented to Dr Mathew Anker, of Te Herenga Waka Victoria – University of Wellington, for achieving a chemical reaction thought to be impossible – the four-electron reduction of benzene – enabling a range of useful applications.
Quantum mechanics predicts that adding four excess electrons to the molecule benzene and incorporating metal atoms will create materials with remarkable properties that can be used in new technologies for magnetic data storage, spintronic devices, and quantum computers.
Until now, making these benzene tetra-anions, and manipulating them in materials, has been extremely difficult because of the highly stable nature of the benzene molecule.
Mathew and his team discovered a simple and accessible method to incorporate benzene tetra-anions with metals into materials, bringing revolutionary applications a step closer to reality and opening a new area of benzene-reduction chemistry.
“My team and myself were developing highly reactive organolanthanide complexes for the low-energy activation of nitrogen – towards a low energy and ‘green’ process for making ammonia fertiliser.”
“We found that the organolanthanide complexes we were developing were reactive enough to activate benzene!” Mathew explains.
He says by incorporating this process and these new molecules into lanthanide materials, made from rare-earth elements, his team will be able to develop the next generation of computing memory storage.
Mathew says it has been a challenging journey to get to this point. In 2021 he initially dismissed the results of his PhD student Georgia Richardson, thinking “that didn’t make sense”.
“Apparently during the routine synthesis of one of her complexes something seemed to have gone wrong and the extremely stable and unreactive solvent she had performed the reaction in, seemed to have reacted with her complex.”
“After recreating this result several times, it became clear that we had in fact reacted our simple starting material with the extremely stable and common solvent benzene,” Mathew explains.
Their paper was published as the cover article in the prestigious Nature Chemistry in January this year.
He says developing understanding of these types of materials is key to New Zealand’s future in quantum technologies.
“New Zealand has a strong history of lanthanide materials research and is helping to push the world forward in these types of technologies.”
On winning the award, Mathew says it’s a “huge honour”.
He would like to give particular thanks to Professor Justin Hodgkiss FRSNZ for his mentorship and his partner Sarah for her support.
“This research really couldn’t have been achieved without all the work that has been done by many talented academics across the globe, akin to ‘we stand on the shoulders of giants’.”
Hamilton Award:
For an early-career researcher for excellence in scientific research.
Citation:
To Mathew David Anker for discovering the four-electron reduction of benzene, providing access to new classes of data-storage materials.