The Inherent Single‐Molecule Magnet Character of Trivalent Uranium

Abstract

SMMs are often based on transition-metal clusters, but significant attention has recently focused on complexes of single and multiple lanthanoid ions, because the crystal-field splitting of the lowest Russell–Saunders multiplet engenders large magnetic anisotropies. [5–11] These anisotropies are responsible for high relaxation barriers and therefore slow magnetic relaxation. However, well isolated high-spin ground states are difficult to achieve within polynuclear lanthanoid SMMs because the valence 4f orbitals have limited radial extension and are usually energetically incompatible with ligand orbitals. These inherent 4f orbital properties give predominantly ionic interactions and results in weak magnetic exchange coupling with neighboring spin centers, with very few exceptions. [7, 12] In principle, actinoids, and in particular uranium, possess properties that render these ions ideal candidates from which to construct SMMs. This is because, compared to the lanthanoids, uranium exhibits enhanced crystal field splitting, [13, 14] as well as increased covalency, the latter enabling significant spin couplings in polynuclear systems, [15] and therefore both stronger magnetic exchange and anisotropies can be envisaged. This premise was realized recently with reports of several closely related single-ion pyrazolylborate uranium(III) complexes which were shown to display SMM behavior. [14, 16–20] In addition, two neptunium complexes were shown to display slow relaxation of the magnetization. [15, 21] The fact that all uranium(III) SMMs reported to date are closely related to each other raises the question as to how sensitive SMM behavior in trivalent uranium is to the composition of the coordination sphere and its symmetry. SMM behavior in all published examples is much more pronounced in an external field than in zero field, which suggests that quantum tunneling of the magnetization plays a significant role in shortening the relaxation times. However, in principle, low-symmetry crystal field components cannot induce tunneling of the magnetization, because uranium(III) is a Kramers half-integer angular momentum ion. Also the nuclear spin I = 0o f 238 U cannot induce tunneling of the