Trigonal Prismatic Tris-pyridineoximate Transition Metal Complexes: A Cobalt(II) Compound with High Magnetic Anisotropy

High magnetic anisotropy is a key property of paramagnetic shift tags, which are mostly studied by NMR spectroscopy, and of single molecule magnets, for which magnetometry is usually used. We successfully employed both these methods in analyzing magnetic properties of a series of transition metal complexes, the so-called clathrochelates. A cobalt complex was found to be both a promising paramagnetic shift tag and a single molecule magnet because of it having large axial magnetic susceptibility tensor anisotropy at room temperature (22.5 × 10–32m3mol–1) and a high effective barrier to magnetization reversal (up to 70.5 cm–1). The origin of this large magnetic anisotropy is a negative value of zero-field splitting energy that reaches −86 cm–1according to magnetometry and NMR measurements.