Magnetic Exchange Interactions in the Molecular Nanomagnet Mn${}_{12}$

Abstract

The discovery of magnetic bistability in Mn${}_{12}$ more than 20 years ago marked the birth of molecular magnetism, an extremely fertile interdisciplinary field and a powerful route to create tailored magnetic nanostructures. However, the difficulty to determine interactions in complex polycentric molecules often prevents their understanding. Mn${}_{12}$ is an outstanding example of this difficulty: although it is the forefather and most studied of all molecular nanomagnets, an unambiguous determination of even the leading magnetic exchange interactions is still lacking. Here we exploit four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering to portray how individual spins fluctuate around the magnetic ground state, thus fixing the exchange couplings of Mn${}_{12}$ for the first time. Our results demonstrate the power of four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering as an unrivaled tool to characterize magnetic clusters.

References in corpus (6)

• Spin Chirality in a Molecular Dysprosium Triangle: the Archetype of the Non-Collinear Ising Model
• Metamagnetic phase transition of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg icosahedron
• Exchange Interactions and High-Energy Spin States in Mn_12-acetate
• Numerically exact and approximate determination of energy eigenvalues for antiferromagnetic molecules using irreducible tensor operators and general point-group symmetries
• First-principles modelling of magnetic excitations in Mn12
• Exchange-coupling constants, spin density map, and Q dependence of the inelastic neutron scattering intensity in single-molecule magnets

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Unravelling the Spin Dynamics of Molecular Nanomagnets with Four-Dimensional Inelastic Neutron Scattering
• Magnetic properties of transition metal dimers probed by inelastic neutron scattering
• Thermodynamics and spin mapping of quantum excitations in a Heisenberg spin heptamer