Divalent Thulium Crown Ether Complexes with Field-Induced Slow Magnetic Relaxation

The tailoring of the coordination chemistry around f-element centers is a crucial step for the development of compounds with slow magnetic relaxation, including single-molecule magnets (SMMs), which have great potential in molecular spintronics and for future quantum computing devices. Lanthanide ions are particularly interesting because the predominant electrostatic model of their bonding allows rationalizing their coordination symmetry. However, to the best of our knowledge, the redox properties of the lanthanides are not taken into account for the design of SMMs, and therefore all SMMs reported to date contain lanthanide ions in their trivalent oxidation state. In this Article, divalent lanthanide compounds presenting field-induced slow magnetic relaxation are reported. The rational design and synthesis of two Tm ^II complexes with the 18-crown-6 ligand are presented along with their emission and EPR properties, which help to probe the desired nature of the ground state, that is, maximizing the anisotropy. The observed magnetic properties demonstrate their slow magnetic relaxation behavior in a moderate external magnetic field.