Humidity—A Powerful Tool to Customize the Physical Properties of Molecular Magnets

• Published in: Chemistry : a European journal Vol. 25; no. 70; pp. 15963 - 15977
• Main Authors: Stefańczyk, Olaf, Ohkoshi, Shin‐ichi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Germany Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 13.12.2019
• Subjects: Chemistry; functional materials; Humidity; humidity control; Iron oxides; Magnetic properties; Magnetite; Magnets; Multifunctional materials; Physical properties; Porosity; porous magnets; Porous materials; Scientists; Steam; switchable materials; Zeolites; magnetic properties; humidity control; switchable materials; functional materials; porous magnets
• ISSN: 0947-6539; 1521-3765
• DOI: 10.1002/chem.201903586

Since the dawn of the century, people have been fascinated by the mysterious force that draws two pieces of lodestone (magnetite, Fe3O4) to each other as well as by property of stilbite (natural zeolite, NaCa4[Si27Al9O72]⋅28 H2O) to generate huge amounts of steam by rapidly heating the material. Nowadays, we know the first effect is addressed by magnetic attraction whereas the second one is related to the reversible sorption/desorption of water from humid air inside porous materials. For a long time, it was thought that these two, at first glance, were disjunctive properties that cannot be combined into one material. Nevertheless, the scientists have once again proved that there are no impossible things. Based on the discovery of the first molecular magnets, the idea to combine magnetic properties with other functionalities such as porosity gained great consideration by scientists from different research fields. Very soon, we witnessed numerous reports of novel multifunctional materials among which we can distinguish humidity‐responsive magnets. In this manuscript, the most outstanding results for such systems working at normal temperature and pressure (NTP) will be presented to motivate in‐depth research on this topic. Steamed magnets: Development of humidity‐switchable multifunctional molecular magnets working reversible at normal temperature and pressure (NTP) conditions is a great challenge in material science. In this work, the most recent achievements in this field are presented (see figure).