Designing and understanding building blocks for molecular spintronics

Abstract

Designing and understanding spin coupling within and between molecules is important for, e.g., nanoscale spintronics, magnetic materials, catalysis, and biochemistry. We review a recently developed approach to analyzing spin coupling in terms of local pathways, which allows to evaluate how much each part of a structure contributes to coupling, and present examples of how first-principles electronic structure theory can help to understand spin coupling in molecular systems which show the potential for photo- or redoxswitching, or where the ground state is stabilized with respect to spin flips by adding unpaired spins on a bridge connecting two spin centers. Finally, we make a connection between spin coupling and conductance through molecular bridges.