Theoretical Design of Optimal Molecular Qudits for Quantum Error Correction

[Image: see text] We pinpoint the key ingredients ruling decoherence in multispin clusters, and we engineer the system Hamiltonian to design optimal molecules embedding quantum error correction. These are antiferromagnetically coupled systems with competing exchange interactions, characterized by many low-energy states in which decoherence is dramatically suppressed and does not increase with the system size. This feature allows us to derive optimized code words, enhancing the power of the quantum error correction code by orders of magnitude. We demonstrate this by a complete simulation of the system dynamics, including the effect of decoherence driven by a nuclear spin bath and the full sequence of pulses to implement error correction and logical gates between protected states.