Unravelling the Spin Dynamics of Molecular Nanomagnets with Four‐Dimensional Inelastic Neutron Scattering

Abstract

Molecular nanomagnets (MNMs) have attracted the attention of the scientific community as the rich physics behind their magnetic behavior make them ideal test‐beds for fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics. Sophisticated experiments and targeted research activities have also unveiled their potential for several technological applications. Inelastic neutron scattering is a powerful and widely used technique to investigate the properties of these systems. The new generation of spectrometers, equipped with arrays of position‐sensitive detectors, enable to efficiently measure the neutron cross‐sections as a function of energy and of the three components of the momentum transfer vector Q, in vast portions of the reciprocal space. Exploiting these capabilities together with the availability of sufficiently large single‐crystal samples of MNMs, it is now possible to obtain an unprecedented insight into the coherent spin dynamics of these molecular clusters. This is witnessed by several recent results that we present in this review. By using the benchmark system Cr8, it has been demonstrated that the richness of the four‐dimensional inelastic neutron scattering technique enables to extract dynamical correlation functions directly from the data. This technique has also been applied to the archetypical single‐molecule magnet Mn12 to unambiguously characterize its Spin Hamiltonian as well as to portray the entanglement between molecular qubits in (Cr7Ni)2.