Synthesis and properties of melocule-based materials

磁铁在我们的社会中无处不在，并塑造了我们文化的技术发展。磁性材料有成千上万的应用：它们被发现在电机和发电机（一个汽车发动机包含超过20个磁铁），在医疗设备（如核磁共振成像技术）和植入物，在电信和雷达技术中，我们使用磁性材料在我们的计算机硬盘驱动器上存储我们的数据。我们对制备新型“分子”磁性材料很感兴趣。这些磁铁不同于大多数人熟悉的“磁铁”，比如氧化铁或镍。我们希望制造非常小的磁铁——在单个分子的尺度上（想象一下，把一根头发分成一万个碎片——其中一个碎片就代表我们的磁铁的大小！）作为化学家，我们研究物质的结构和性质，我们也从事通过“化学合成”的过程制备新物质的工作。大多数传统磁铁的特性使得操纵它们的结构非常困难或不可能。另一方面，合成化学家能够改变分子结构。如果我们可以基于分子前体制造磁铁，我们就有机会通过我们的合成操作来调整材料的性质。通过这种方式，我们可以创造出具有前所未有性能的磁铁：液体磁铁或塑料磁铁只是许多令人兴奋的可能性中的两个；事实上，我们希望将这些材料用于未来的磁性数据存储介质或作为新的传感设备。我们希望我们的材料在未来能够极大地提高计算机数据存储容量和处理器速度，以及其他一些令人兴奋的潜在应用。

Magnets are ever-present in our society and have shaped the technological development of our culture. There are literally thousands of applications of magnetic materials: They are found in motors and generators (an automobile engine contains over 20 magnets), in medical devices (such as MRI technology) and implants, in telecommunication, and radar technology and we use magnetic materials to store our data on our computer hard drives. We are interested in the preparation of new "molecular" magnetic materials. These are different from the "magnets" most people are familiar with, like iron oxide or nickel. We wish to make extremely small magnets-on the scale of single molecules (imagine dividing a human hair into ten thousand fragments-one of these fragments represents the size of our magnet!). As chemists, we study the structure and properties of matter: we are also engaged in the preparation of new matter by a process called "chemical synthesis". Most traditional magnets have properties that make the manipulation of their structure very difficult or impossible. On the other hand, synthetic chemists are able to alter molecular structures. If we can build magnets based on molecular precursors, we have the opportunity to tune the properties of our materials with our synthetic manipulations. In this way, we can create magnets with unprecedented properties: Liquid magnets or plastic magnets are just a couple of the many exciting possibilities; in fact, we hope to use these materials for future applications in magnetic data storage media or as new sensory devices. We expect our materials to tremendously increase computer data storage capacities and processor speeds in the future, in addition to a number of other exciting potential applications.