Molecular Cluster Magnets

摘要

In April 2012, Jeffrey Mervis wrote in Science that about 1.2 zettabytes (1.2x10~(21) bytes) of electronic data are generated every year by humans. The world is going to face critical problems to store this enormous amount of data that increases inexorably. This is why nowadays a considerable amount of international research activity is orientated towards the synthesis of nanometer-scale magnetic systems, with the long-term goal to reduce the size of the magnetic units that code information in storage devices. Different approaches have been used to obtain single-domain magnetic particles, but the beginning of the 1990s marked the discovery of single-molecule magnets (SMMs), which raised the hope that information might be stored in a single molecule. In the 20 years since then, numerous SMMs and related molecule-based magnets have been discovered, and a broad research community is currently working on new systems with improved magnetic characteristics. In 2006, Dante Gatteschi, Roberta Sessoli, and Jacques Villain published Molecular Nano-magnets (Oxford University Press), the first book describing the chemistry as well as the physics of these nanomagnets.