Association Contrôlée de Molécules-Aimants pour une nouvelle Génération de Matériaux magnétiques – AC-MAGnets

In the last ten years, considerable research efforts has been devoted to the synthesis of nanometer scale magnetic systems with the ultimate goal to reduce the size of the magnetic units that store information. Different approaches have been used to obtain single-domain magnetic particles, but the beginning of the 1990's marked the discovery of Single-Molecule Magnets (SMMs) which created the hope to store information on a single molecule. In the 15 years since, numerous Single-Molecule Magnets have been discovered and a broad community currently works on new systems with improved magnetic characteristics. However, it has also become an important goal to diversify a part of our research toward the organization of these nanomagnets in order to progress towards future applications. A few strategies have been recently proposed such as the organization of SMMs on surfaces, their insertion in mesoporous materials or also their association by coordination chemistry. Since 2001, we have actively participated in the last two approaches and obtained significant results. Our idea to organize SMMs in coordination networks has been the most successful strategy and lead to the discovery of new magnetic behaviors. These results open today a complete new area of research to design new types of magnetic materials based on Single-Molecule Magnets. Our work allows us today to envision that these systems will display remarkable properties such as 'improved' SMM behaviors, high temperature Single-Chain Magnets (SCMs), photomagnetic SMM and SCM materials and also high TC magnets that might be the answers to the greatest challenges that face this field of research. This proposal has the ambition to show the feasibility to synthesize and characterize these unprecedented systems in the next three years by associating (i) the M3 team (CRPP-Pessac) specialist of the synthesis, characterization and physics of SMMs, SCMs and Magnetic Materials with (ii) Chemists and Physical-Chemists from the « Molecular Sciences » group of the ICMCB (Pessac) specialized in spin-crossover and photomagnetic complexes; (iii) Chemists from Rennes (MaCSE team) specialized in radicals and metal/radical building blocks and finally (iv) Physicists from the ILL (Grenoble) specialists in solid state physics including neutron diffraction for structural and magnetic analyses in extreme conditions (temperature, pressure, light').