Chemical Spin Patterning in Metal-Organic Frameworks

Abstract

Emergent phenomena are ubiquitous and fundamental to life as we know it, serving as vital environmental regulators, such as the production of honey by honeybees. These phenomena occur when individual components of a system interact, generating new collective behaviors. In magnets, interactions between electron spins result in emergent properties with profound fundamental and technological implications. As metal-organic-frameworks (MOFs) are highly tailorable materials, this thesis will examine the utilization of MOF platforms to engineer bespoke spin properties. Through deliberate manipulation of magnetic interactions, we engineer custom magnetic materials with unique emergent properties. Our investigation begins with the controlled construction of magnetic interactions in a family of chemically similar but structurally distinct metal-organic materials. Despite sharing the same magnetic components, variations in their structural and magnetic dimensionalities significantly influence their magnetic behaviors. In the following section, we address current experimental challenges in engineering spin frustration within honeycomb lattices. We introduce a novel model for spin frustration on this lattice and employ MOFs to realize this concept. The tailorable nature of this MOF platform facilitates the investigation of how manipulable chemical interactions influence the resulting magnetic properties. The concluding section outlines a synthetic strategy for designing an underexplored magnetic model, leveraging the versatility of MOF synthesis to make new materials from preexisting structures. Highlighting our initial findings, we offer brief insight into the future prospects of this endeavor. These combined studies underscore the remarkable potential of MOF platforms in creating designer magnetic materials, representing significant progress in the field of condensed matter physics.