  Magnetic fields as weak as Earth's may affect the outcome of certain
photochemical reactions that go through a radical pair intermediate. When the
reaction environment is anisotropic, this phenomenon can form the basis of a
chemical compass and has been proposed as a mechanism for animal
magnetoreception. Here, we demonstrate how to optimize the design of a chemical
compass with a much better directional sensitivity simply by a gradient field,
e.g. from a magnetic nanostructure. We propose an experimental test of these
predictions, and suggest design principles for a hybrid metallic-organic
chemical compass. In addition to the practical interest in designing a
biomimetic weak magnetic field sensor, our result shows that gradient fields
can server as powerful tools to probe spin correlations in radical pair
reactions.
