CASUS Institute Seminar, Thomas Heine, CASUS Visiting Professor, School of Science, TU Dresden, Germany
Abstract of the talk// It is generally accepted that carbon is the most versatile element of the periodic table, and it offers a plethora of compounds ranging from biology to materials science. While the list of fascinating properties carbon materials offer is long, they are not yet famous for magnetism.
Indeed, most carbon materials are diamagnetic. Defects, dopants and dangling bonds can introduce paramagnetic centers without the potential to generate magnetic ordering. Recently reported magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene may become ferromagnetic due to a half-filled flat band at the fermi level and spin-orbit coupling [1]. A spectacular early report on magnetic carbon in pressurized fullerenes [2] was found to be caused by defects and the paper has been retracted five years later.
Thomas and his team propose an alternative concept to generate carbon materials with strongly coupled magnetic centers. Their materials are based on molecular triangulene and its derivatives, aromatic molecules intrinsically carrying one or two unpaired electrons. Using covalent linkages that preserve electron conjugation, they construct two-dimensional polymers with honeycomb-kagome lattice. The magnetic coupling between the monomers is facilitated by the linker groups. This has been examined in detail for the dimers [3]. When extending this concept to 2D polymers, the researchers predict magnetic carbon materials with intriguing electronic structure that includes Stoner ferromagnetism with Weyl points at the Fermi level, and Mott-Hubbard insulator antiferromagnetism, which would be the first metal-free ferro- and antiferromagnetic materials with strong magnetic coupling with a Curie/Néel temperature above 250 K [4].
References//
[1] A. A. Sharpe E. J. Fox, A. W. Barnard, J. Finney, K. Watanabe, T. Taniguchi, M. A. Kastner, D. Goldhaber-Gordon, ACS Nano 21, 4299 (2021).
[2] T. L. Makarova, B. Sundqvist, R. Höhne, P. Esquinazi, Y. Kopelevich, P. Scharff, V. A. Davydov, L. S. Kashevarova, A. V. Rakhmanina, Nature 413, 716, (2001) (retracted).
[3] H. Yu, T. Heine, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 145, 19303 (2023).
[4] H. Yu, T. Heine, submitted, arxiv: 2311.09026
Thomas Heine will be talking live in Görlitz. However, as the event is organized in a hybrid format that includes a videoconferencing tool by Zoom Inc., people interested in the topic have the chance to also join the talk remotely. Please ask for the videoconferencing details via contact@casus.science.