Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Magnets are ever-present in our society and have shaped the technological development of our culture. There are literally thousands of applications of magnetic materials: They are found in motors and generators (an automobile engine contains over 20 magnets), in medical devices (such as MRI technology) and implants, in telecommunication, and radar technology and we use magnetic materials to store our data on our computer hard drives. We are interested in the preparation of new "molecular" magnetic materials. These are different from the "magnets" most people are familiar with, like iron oxide or nickel. We wish to make extremely small magnets-on the scale of single molecules (imagine dividing a human hair into ten thousand fragments-one of these fragments represents the size of our magnet!). As chemists, we study the structure and properties of matter: we are also engaged in the preparation of new matter by a process called "chemical synthesis". Most traditional magnets have properties that make the manipulation of their structure very difficult or impossible. On the other hand, synthetic chemists are able to alter molecular structures. If we can build magnets based on molecular precursors, we have the opportunity to tune the properties of our materials with our synthetic manipulations. In this way, we can create magnets with unprecedented properties: Liquid magnets or plastic magnets are just a couple of the many exciting possibilities; in fact, we hope to use these materials for future applications in magnetic data storage media or as new sensory devices. We expect our materials to tremendously increase computer data storage capacities and processor speeds in the future, in addition to a number of other exciting potential applications.