The Quantum Magnetism of Individual Manganese-12-Acetate Molecular Magnets Anchored at Surfaces

Abstract

The high intrinsic spin and long spin relaxation time of manganese-12-acetate (Mn(12)) makes it an archetypical single molecular magnet. While these characteristics have been measured on bulk samples, questions remain whether the magnetic properties replicate themselves in surface supported isolated molecules, a prerequisite for any application. Here we demonstrate that electrospray ion beam deposition facilitates grafting of intact Mn(12) molecules on metal as well as ultrathin insulating surfaces enabling submolecular resolution imaging by scanning tunneling microscopy. Using scanning tunneling spectroscopy we detect spin excitations from the magnetic ground state of the molecule at an ultrathin boron nitride decoupling layer. Our results are supported by density functional theory based calculations and establish that individual Mn(12) molecules retain their intrinsic spin on a well chosen solid support.

Reduction of Mn19 Coordination Clusters on a Gold Surface

“…49 Interestingly, the Mn reduction is almost absent in the Mn 6 single-molecule magnet when deposited on a Au(111) surface. 50 In view of the finding that the second layer of molecules is of mixed valence kind similar to the pristine molecules, the introduction of spacer molecules 44,51 or decoupling layers such as hexagonal boron nitride or graphene 52,53 could be a viable means of protecting the Mn 19 (SMe) molecules from reduction.…”

Boron Nitride on Cu(111): An Electronically Corrugated Monolayer

“…[10][11][12] Furthermore h-BN allows to tune the band gap of graphene in heterostructures 8,13 or in hybridized single-layer systems 14 . Regarding the use of epitaxial BN monolayers as templates, several recent reports highlight functionalities gained by the decoupling and ordering properties of BN [15][16][17][18][19] .…”

Origin of Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy and Large Orbital Moment in Fe Atoms on MgO

“…This confirms the validity of the multiplet model on a scale of more than 100 meV, the largest ever probed by IETS. Transitions between states belonging to different spin multiplets have been observed in spin chains [57,70] and molecular magnets [71]. Unique to Fe on MgO, the excitation from lower to upper spin multiplets involves a transition from aligned (lower multiplet) to antialigned (upper multiplet) orbital and spin moments.…”