Quantum technologies promise communication networks and computing platforms that are both more powerful and, for many tasks, dramatically more energy efficient than their classical counterparts. Realizing that promise requires quantum bits — qubits — that can be prepared, manipulated, and read out with high fidelity. Photon polarization and electronic spin are two of the most attractive qubit carriers, and both can be addressed through a single structural feature: chirality - the handedness of an object lacking mirror symmetry (an example form your left and right hand).

We engineer chirality and magnetic impurities into soft semiconductors — molecular materials, halide perovskites, and hybrid superstructures — to prepare, control, and read out spin and polarization states directly from thin films, often at room temperature. To see what these materials are actually doing, we have developed a new generation of broadband, transient spectroscopy techniques that recover the full polarization state of emitted light — all four Stokes parameters — with 10⁻⁴ sensitivity, uncovering chiroptical phenomena that were invisible to conventional tools. Coupling this bottom-up chemistry with next-generation spectro-microscopy opens a route to spin qubit manipulation and optical devices that are inherently cheap, scalable, flexible, and extremely energy-efficient.