Magnetic characterisation of SMMs invariantly involve measuring and modelling the so-called relaxation profile, that is, the temperature dependence of the relaxation times. For that, AC susceptibility and DC magnetometry are employed t extract relaxation times, which are later modelled with parametrised functions derived from spin-phonon coupling mechanisms. Some of my contributions to automatise data treatment and make interpretation more meaningful are listed below.
Some SMMs present two distinct relaxation times that evolve differently with temperature - in the crossing points, information is lost because the measured signal is an envelope of two unresolved peaks. Here, we present a way to disentangle the individual contributions to the overall signal, offering a simple procedure to track the relaxation times over a longer temperature range.
Int J Quantum Chem. 2020, 120:e26248.
In this Perspective, we outline recent progress in SMMs and give our personal account on how close collaboration between experiment and theory is crucial to advance the field. Key concepts to commonly employed magnetic characterisation techniques are presented in a (hopefully) accessible manner.
Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2019, 21, 23567-23575
Here we preset an approach to extract meaningful, yet previously overlooked, information from the model functions used to fit the data. We translate the alpha parameter in the Generalised Debye function used to fit AC susceptibility data into a measure of error associated to the relaxation times, which grants the fitted relaxation profile parameters with a more meaningful statistical significance. We also provide, free of charge, the CCFIT2 program, a user-friendly code to automatise the data treatment and generate publication-ready plots.
