Designer Prussian Blue Analogues Molecular Magnets with Possible Applications

Magnetic materials are the key components of many electronics devices for storage and retrieval of information, such as computer hard drives and video tapes. Magnetic materials are also in high demand in power generation, non-polluting electric vehicles, medical science, telecommunication, etc. Due to wide technological applications of magnetic materials, there have always been quests for new magnetic materials. Presently, an intense level of research is dedicated to fabricate new magnetic material based electronic devices. Historically, magnetic materials used so far for devices are inorganic in nature. However, organic or moleculebased materials offer possibility of using light-weight flexible materials that include magnetic functionalities. Magnets fabricated using organic/ molecular compounds having unpaired electrons, located either in s-or p-orbitals (in pure organic radicals), or in dor f-orbitals (in transition or lanthanide metal ions) are termed as molecular magnets. The first molecular ferromagnet was discovered in 1986 which was magnetically ordered at very low temperature of 4.8 K, demonstrated that a magnet could be made using organic chemistry and without usual high temperature energy intensive processing [1, 2]. This discovery opened a new branch of magnetism called molecular magnetism, with endless possibilities of tailoring new magnetic materials for organic electronics and spintronic applications by using organic, organo-metallic and coordination metal chemistry [3, 4]. We have investigated structural and magnetic properties of a large variety of Prussian blue based molecular magnetic compounds. These materials show promising multifunctional properties that are important for various technological applications. The present article gives an overview of some of these results.