Organometallic Compounds with Designed Spin States

The design of molecules that could be utilized for information processing and information storage is one of the main challenges in molecular materials science. The molecules that would be suitable for such applications must exhibit bistability, which may be defined as a property of a molecular system that allows it to exist in two different electronic states over a certain range of external perturbation. A typical example of a molecular species that exhibits such a molecular bistability are spin crossover compounds. Spin crossover compounds that will exhibit a large thermal hysteresis around room temperature need to be developed for practical applications. Although many attempts have been made to produce a suitable compound in previous studies, so far the production of spin-crossover compounds with such a wide hysteresis is still a challenging issue.