Molecular Magnetism Group

What we do is interdisciplinary. It involves skills ranging from handling incredibly sensitive materials, through to being able to perform very high level calculations, supported by extremely difficult measurement. You need people who can do each of those – it would be unreasonable to expect one person to be able to cover all those bases. This is why I like the team award: it recognises how we work.

That's a very good question, but I always find it a little difficult, because I try very hard not to follow the paths that everybody else follows. Everybody tells me that we're going to be putting these molecules on surfaces and using those as information storage devices. We still need to move up the temperature at which you can store information to be genuinely technologically applicable, but the change from five years ago is astonishing.
On information processing, we're looking at trying to use the entire quantum states of a system. Traditional information storage uses the electrons in a movement. But the advantage of a molecule is that you have electronic states and nuclear states, and you could potentially use all of them. And if you could work out a way of using all of them reliably, you would be able to perform quantum error corrections, and that begins to be competitive with the sort of thing that Google are already doing.
 

One of the things I’ve often said is that the most important papers published for my research were not published by me. They were published by other people, and I could then reference them and show how important the work is and therefore push for UK activity in that area. You’re not competing with people elsewhere – we are all colleagues. You are working alongside others and you are trying basically to discover what you can. In the best research culture, the science comes before the egos of the people doing the science.

Chemistry is the fundamental characteristic to everything in nature. Many of the changes we observe around us are due to some kind of chemical reaction.

A career in chemistry gives you an all rounded perspective of most industries and gives you the skills for the real world. It also changes the way to think and analyse things. So chemistry isn’t just about the periodic table and chemical reactions but changes your thought process and ways to solve problems.

I think our biggest inspiration is to share our expertise to illustrate the beauty of our diverse group in molecular chemistry.

It was chemistry that had not been attempted with molecular systems like we were working with. We had no idea if it would work, and then it took optimization to conclusively characterize the identity of the compounds, this is where [Fabrizio] Ortu stepped in.
Initially we did not realize the material was temperature sensitive, and the first measurements were very disappointing, as was suspected they might end up being. A chance remark by [Nicholas] Chilton that the sample was “a lovely pink colour”, when it is actually bright yellow, lead us to revisit measurements. Once we began magnetic characterization properly, we didn’t initially believe the results we got – the previous record high-temperature molecular magnet functioned at 14 K, and we saw hysteresis loops at 2 K that simply did not make sense or have any precedence. It took a lot of data gathering to convince ourselves that we hadn’t made a mistake.

Some of the largest problems facing society currently, from air pollution, climate change, even global pandemics, all require chemical science contributions to solve. There is incredible technology involved in the manufacture of tests for diseases and treatments/vaccinations – these have required feats of chemical engineering to reliably mass-produce fine chemicals/products that were simply ideas on a whiteboard a few years ago.
Solutions to climate change and air pollution require cleaner ways of producing the materials we need to make transitions away from fossil fuels – mining and processing rare earths, and their recycling, is a very intensive process. Research programmes in this area are already demonstrating recycling capabilities.
While not always visible in the headlines, chemical know-how often underpins larger headlines, such as figuring out how to reliably produce the next-generation polymer in an airplane frame, or in how to make renewable and degradable alternatives to current disposable plastics.

Do it because you found something fascinating and your enthusiasm will carry you through the hard parts. I watched a demonstrator freeze a banana in liquid nitrogen and smash it with a hammer when I was 12 and that made me think about the physical sciences. I then got to do a lot of practical chemistry during high school and that made me want to learn and do practical chemistry. Finally, I find tremendous satisfaction in seeing the colours of metal compounds, and that led me to inorganic chemistry. Passion, excitement, inquisitiveness, and a helping of perseverance are the keys to chemistry and anyone can do it if they find the world around them interesting. Chemistry is everywhere.