Spectroscopic Studies of Single-Ion Magnets

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In this project, funded by the Chemical Structure, Dynamic & Mechanism B Program of the Chemistry Division, Professor Ziling B Xue of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee is studying molecular magnets for their potential applications as a new generation of materials for information storage and quantum computation. Such materials could have a much larger storage capacity than the current storage materials with significant energy savings and reduced environmental impacts. The goal of the research is to use spectroscopies to probe properties of molecular magnets to help design better materials in the future. The project is interdisciplinary covering inorganic, physical, and materials chemistries. It will offer graduate and undergraduate students opportunities to conduct research at national laboratories and broaden their educational background and training. Professor Xue plans to attract high school students who are potential first-generation college students from low-income families to sciences.Molecular magnets demonstrate slow magnetic relaxations and quantum tunneling. Some such magnets have been shown to be candidates for chemical qubits. Research efforts have been mostly focused on design and preparation of the magnets with large anisotropies and slow relaxations. However, there has been relatively little understanding of the nature of certain critical properties of the magnets such as spin-lattice interactions, spin-spin interactions, and molecular dynamics. In this project, molecular magnets will be studied by several spectroscopic methods to answer the following questions: (1) Can variable-field and variable-temperature inelastic neutron scattering reveal magnetic transitions and spin-phonon couplings in molecular magnets? (2) Can the intermolecular interactions in the molecular magnets be probed by inelastic neutron scattering? (3) What properties in the molecular magnets can Raman and far-IR spectroscopies reveal? (4) How dynamics in the molecular magnets could be studied by quasielastic neutron scattering? The project could demonstrate that these spectroscopies could be developed into new methods to probe molecular magnetism.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.