Experimental observation of magnetism in rhodium clusters

Spin-rotation coupling in ferromagnetic clusters

“…Susceptibilities measured in Stern-Gerlach experiments can be large, with an irregular dependence on the number of atoms in the cluster. High susceptibilities are found not only in normally ferromagnetic elements but also in an element, rhodium [8], which is not ferromagnetic in the bulk. The character of the susceptibility is also variable.…”

Interplay between bonding and magnetism in the binding of NO to Rh clusters

“…Experimental studies on bare Rh clusters have been carried out by Cox et al 8,9 who found that the clusters do indeed possess rather large magnetic moments, ranging from 0.3 -1.1 µ B per atom; the magnetic moment per atom decreases with the size of the cluster, becoming zero in the neighborhood of n = 60. However, the smallest cluster studied by them corresponds to n = 8.…”

“…7,8,9 At first sight, magnetism might be expected to further enhance the catalytic activity of small Rh clusters: due to the familiar phenomenon that magnetism tends to increase interatomic distances, magnetic clusters will possess a lower effective coordination, and thus conceivably be better catalysts, than non-magnetic ones. However, as we will show below, the situation is somewhat more complicated than this.…”

Probing the structures of gas-phase rhodium cluster cations by far-infrared spectroscopy

“…The magnetic moments, 4,5 electric polarizability, 6 and reactivity with a range of small molecules [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] have been investigated, in many instances revealing a significant size dependence of these properties. In several cases, reaction rate measurements on monodisperse cluster samples have suggested multiple reactivities, indicating the presence of multiple forms of clusters of the same size.…”