Unravelling the Spin Dynamics of Molecular Nanomagnets with Four-Dimensional Inelastic Neutron Scattering

Abstract

Molecular Nanomagnets have attracted the attention of the scientific community since the rich physics behind their magnetic behaviour make them ideal test-beds for fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics. Sophisticated experiments and targeted research activities have also unveiled their potential for several technological applications. Inelastic neutron scattering is a powerful and widely used technique to investigate the properties of these systems. The new generation of spectrometers, equipped with arrays of position-sensitive detectors, enable to efficiently measure the neutron cross-sections as a function of energy and of the three component of the momentum transfer vector Q, in vast portions of the reciprocal space. Exploiting these capabilities together with the availability of sufficiently large single-crystal samples of MNMs, it is now possible to obtain an unprecedented insight into the coherent spin dynamics of these molecular clusters. This is witnessed by several recent results, that we present in this review. By using the benchmark system Cr${}_8$, it has been demonstrated that the richness of the four-dimensional inelastic neutrons scattering technique enables to extract dynamical correlation functions directly from the data. This technique has been also applied to the archetypical single-molecule magnet Mn${}_{12}$ to unambiguously characterise its Spin Hamiltonian as well as to portray the entanglement between molecular qubits in (Cr${}_7$Ni)${}_2$.

References in corpus (6)

• Operating Quantum States in Single Magnetic Molecules: Implementation of Grover's Quantum Algorithm
• Exchange Interactions and High-Energy Spin States in Mn_12-acetate
• Magnetic Exchange Interactions in the Molecular Nanomagnet Mn${}_{12}$
• Quantized antiferromagnetic spin waves in the molecular Heisenberg ring CsFe${}_8$
• Exchange-coupling constants, spin density map, and Q dependence of the inelastic neutron scattering intensity in single-molecule magnets
• Magnetic spectra in the tridiminished-icosahedron \{Fe${}_9$\} nano-cluster by inelastic neutron scattering

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Witnessing Entanglement and Quantum Correlations in Condensed Matter: A Review
• Symmetry-Induced Universal Momentum-Transfer Dependencies for Inelastic Neutron Scattering on Anisotropic Spin Clusters
• Witnessing Disorder in Quantum Magnets