The project concerns the search for novel smart materials that will be suitable for the construction of new generations of efficient and miniaturized electronic, magnetic, optical, and energy conversion devices, in particular, high-performance data storage systems. To address the challenge of organizing people’s lives in a more efficient and less energy-consuming way, there is a strong necessity to have better and better devices relying on small portable energy sources. Technological progress in this matter needs novel materials fulfilling as many requirements as possible from the set of extreme miniaturization, high efficiency in demonstrating desired physical properties, low cost of production, low energy consumption level, and an environmentally friendly character. Recent years proved that constructing such new-era materials can be effectively realized by processing well-known or novel functional materials into the nanoscale. In this approach, nanomaterials bearing specific functions can be combined to get a high-performance multi-component system with an overall small, even nanometric, size. Aiming at smart devices, multifunctional nanomaterials, revealing a few different physical properties, can also be obtained using this strategy; however, the incorporated functionalities originate from separate materials that are further processed. This project is aimed at realizing the idea of multifunctional materials not at the nanoscale but at the molecular level by constructing single-phase materials based on molecules providing many desired properties. Such materials are expected to be alternatives to the currently explored nanodevices based on separate functional components as a single component of a device might then provide, e.g. both magnetic and optical memory effects. In this context, the project is aimed at crossing the current limits of single-phase multifunctional materials. To achieve this, the project is focused on searching for proper molecular precursors based on metal complexes that serve as chiral luminophores (CLs), i.e. the molecules linking the photoluminescence (PL) with chirality as then an advanced circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) will be observed. Moreover, it is planned that such CLs will be functionalized toward magnetic, ferroelectric, and photoswitching abilities to produce luminescence-based multi-field molecular switches where the PL and CPL optical effects will be sensitive to the magnetic field, electric field, and light, thus they will be great candidates for memory devices. The ultimate goal is to synthesize multifunctional materials based on CLs that will combine magnetic, ferroelectric, and photoswitching functionalities to use them as the single component for the nanometric multi-state memory device.
