Designer Magnetochiral Dichroism: Eu(II) as the optimal solution for strong magnetoelectric coupling in lanthanoid coordination complexes.

The capability to address and to individually manipulate molecular magnetic moments is a prerequisite for the fabrication of future information technology devices that will incorporate molecular magnetic materials. This is possible for chiral magnetic materials displaying the magnetoelectric effect, where the absence of inversion symmetry leads to efficient coupling of local electric fields to the molecular magnetic moment. This magnetoelectric coupling leads to magnetochiral dichroism (MXD). To achieve a sizeable magnetoelectric coupling, allowing for efficient manipulation of molecular magnetic moments by electric fields, strong spin-orbit coupling in the targeted material is required. Thus, lanthanide-based materials appear as excellent candidates to this purpose. We propose herein to study the MXD of Eu(II) chiral coordination complexes to demonstrate the strongest possible magnetoelectric coupling in lanthanide-based molecular materials.