Functional materials are those possessing desirable tuned properties for applications such as, but not limited to, energy harvesting, storage, memory and communication devices. Functional materials can be any type of specially designed material with a determined function: semiconductors, polymers, porous media, molecular crystals or nanoparticles are good examples of them. Their special...
In the quest for quantum technologies, Molecular Magnetism is offering a variety of promising systems. Indeed, Molecular NanoMagnets (MNMs) can either be exploited as classical bits in high-density magnetic memories or as qubits for quantum information processing. One of the most important goals in the current research in this field is to reach a deep understanding of magnetic relaxation and...
Weak van der Waals interactions that bind together organic molecules in the solid state lie at the heart of many highly relevant scientific problems, from soot formation in the atmosphere to polymorphism in pharmaceutical compounds. Nonetheless, the effects of these forces on the structure and (especially) dynamics of molecular materials are not yet fully understood.
Another application of van...
Ammonium sulfate, a common garden fertiliser, displays a ferroelectric phase transition with a large entropy change whose origins have proved controversial. Understanding this will provide an important insight in to its barocaloric properties, and how these might be developed into future environmentally friendly cooling applications. Here we approach this question using quasielastic,...
The ability to control magnetic and electric properties is attractive for tailoring materials for devices, data storage and sensor technology. In magnetoelectric materials, these two degrees of freedom are closely linked and this makes them particularly interesting [1]. Here we study one such system, LiNi$_{1−x}$Fe$_x$PO$_4$, using magnetometry, polarized neutron diffraction, pyrocurrent...
