Polyfunctional magnetic materials for molecular spintronics

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Eva Rentschler
• Subject Area: Inorganic Molecular Chemistry - Synthesis and Characterisation
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465116281

The search for new types of functional materials is one of the crucial tasks of modern chemical science. Molecular compounds allow to obtain materials with various excellent properties that are built-in at the level of a single molecule. One of the possible applications is in molecular spintronic devices, mostly, for information storage and processing. The goal of the present project is to contribute to the search for new molecular materials able to reversibly switch their magnetic properties in order to use them in future molecular spintronic devices for information storage and processing. In addition to meeting the requirements necessary for the use of such compounds in molecular spintronic devices (e.g. the ability to exist in two spin states, slow magnetic relaxation, or a long phase memory time), they must have additional properties that make it possible to control their magnetic characteristics. To this end, a systematic study will be carried out in this project, in which various aspects of the electronic and molecular structure are investigated in a variety of polynuclear complexes of 3d and 4f transition metals. Thus, the influence on the magnetic and electronic properties of the molecular materials is investigated depending on the choice of metal ions and their combinations, as well as the influence of the substituents in the ligands or the influence by the stimuli used to switch the systems.The prerequisite for this successful study is, of course, the right choice of suitable ligands that enable polynuclear complexes of different compositions with a given combination of 3d- and 4f- transition metals. In this project, we propose substituted acylpyrazole pyridines containing 2-(pyrazol-3-yl)pyridine and beta-diketonate binding pockets. Both units have been proven to selectively bind 3d- and 4f- transition metal ions showing either a spin transition (e.g. for Fe(II) and Co(II)) or single molecule magnet behavior (e.g. for Co(II) and Dy(III)) or be qubits (e.g. for Mn(II) and Gd(III)) in the coordination environment of either the 2-(pyrazol-3-yl)pyridine and beta-diketonate fragments, respectively. We will now use of the combination of both coordination pockets in just one ligand, so that two different ions of 3d- and 4f- transition metals can be bound simultaneously, resulting in a very large variety of multi-nuclear complexes with multifunctional properties.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Russia
• Partner Organisation: Russian Science Foundation, until 3/2022
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Yulia Nelyubina, until 3/2022