Clarkson University’s Associate Professor of Chemistry & Biomolecular Science, Dr. Mario Wriedt, has his research featured on the cover of the Journal of the American Chemical Society for his work entitled “Direct Imaging of Isolated Single-Molecule Magnets in Metal–Organic Frameworks.”
Wriedt and his team at Clarkson collaborated with researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Texas A&M University, and Northwestern University to pioneer the field of the nanostructuration of single molecule magnets. Their groundbreaking results have the potential to bring this material’s class toward practical spintronic applications such as ultrahigh-density data storage and quantum computing.
Practical applications involving the magnetic bistability of single-molecule magnets for next-generation computer technologies require nanostructuring, organization, and protection of the nanoscale materials in two- or three-dimensional networks to enable read-and-write processes. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), due to their defined and tunable porosity, have been proposed as hosts to facilitate these efforts.
Wriedt and his fellow researchers are the first to capture direct images of isolated single-molecule magnets in MOFs providing previously inaccessible visual structural insights into these nanomagnetic composites.
“We are the first to directly image in real space guest molecules within MOFs where previously our field relied on limited indirect methods to elucidate fundamental structural information inside these porous hosts,” Wriedt said. “MOFs are known to be electron beam sensitive and decompose once the electron beam hits the material which render established imagining techniques ineffective to explore these composite systems. Through our collaborative efforts, we used a low dosage of electrons to image our material without degrading the framework which provides direct evidence to support our claims of successful nanostructuration.”
“This work has been an exciting venture for us and through it we were able to expand the techniques available to the MOF community and to the field of porous materials to characterize and understand complex systems. It is an honor to have this work recognized and featured on the cover of JACS,” Wriedt said.
The full article can be read here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.8b11374
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