Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

One of the great challenges facing information and energy transfer technologies in the next decade is the development of environmentally friendly materials possessing multifunctional behavior, that is, systems that offer a combination of two or more physical properties, e.g., optical, conductive, magnetic, that can be used together in information storage devices. In the emerging field of spin-electronics, for example, materials must display both conductive and magnetic signatures.The emerging realization that it is possible to build molecular or ""organic"" radicals that function in this capacity, serving jointly as single-component magnetic and electronic materials, has sparked a world-wide surge in interest in the design, synthesis and structural characterization of property-specific radicals. This highly interdisciplinary proposal, which bridges the interface between synthetic organic chemistry and condensed matter physics, addresses the creation and characterization of new molecular radical-based materials whose physical properties lie at the crossover point between a conventional metal and a magnetic insulator. As such these systems constitute a new class of highly correlated conductor, with potential applications in, for example, the development of magnetic materials, magnetoresistors and high-temperature superconductors. Their structures, and hence their magnetic and electronic performance can be easily fine-tuned either by the application of physical pressure or through molecular (chemical) modification, a feature which provides both flexibity and opportunity in the design of magnetothermal and magneto-optical switches. The potential for using these new radicals in the development of photovoltaics (solar cells) will also be explored. From an environmental perspective these organic, radical-based materials are particularly appealing, since their structures are completely metal-free.