The fellow realized soon that the proposed approach, which consisted on the use of flexible ligands in ET pairs and squares to allow further coordination, had some drawbacks. Thus, the control on the dimensionality of the final compounds was lost due to the flexibility of the ligands as, instead of obtaining pairs, the different building blocks assembled in a trinuclear and a mononuclear molecular objects. By studying the newly synthesized compounds and the compounds known in the host groups, it was concluded that to get the desired properties, the redox potential difference between the donor (Co) and acceptor (Fe) units needs to be close to 1 V. If the difference is larger, the ET process will never be observed while if it is lower, diamagnetic entities will be obtained.
On the other hand, the fellow managed to synthesize a novel square with an interesting property: multistep ET process. In this compound, the ET occurs at different temperatures for the two FeCo halves of the square, leading to a two-step decrease on the magnetic susceptibility upon cooling. This compound can be then photoexcited to give the initial paramagnetic state. It should be noted that this is only the second FeCo molecular square displaying such behaviour, while a three-step process has also been observed in one molecular system.
Finally, the fellow worked on the preparation of polynuclear and extended coordination compounds using different ET building blocks. In parallel, extended systems with interesting properties were also targeted by using a second synthetic approach: the use of redox non-innocent ligands. In these systems, an ET process from the metal to the ligand can lead to radical ligands and to interesting magnetic and conductive properties. The work carried out in this regard was published in Polyhedron 2018, 153, pp 248-253 and an overview article was written for a broader audience: Redox-Active Approach Towards New Magnetic And Conductive Two-Dimensional Materials (published in the Science Trends platform).
The results on FeCo Prussian Blue Analogues have been presented in the following conferences: GdR MCM-2 (Dourdan, France, 2017 and 2018), 68th CJSCC (Sendai, Japan, 2018) and 43rd ICCC (Sendai, Japan, 2018) and 16th ICMM (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2018). The results have been presented in two formal group meetings to the teams involved in the project and several visiting researchers. The fellow attended to 3rd BOOK-D (Pessac, France, 2017), 6th ECMM (Bucharest, Rumania, 2017) and a meeting about Emergent Physical Phenomena in Condensed-Matter Systems (Bordeaux, France, 2019). The fellow participated in two outreach activities to promote gender equality in the scientific community: Journée Filles et Maths (Bordeaux, France, 2018) and La Science Taille XX Elles (Toulouse, France, 2018). Finally, during one week the fellow showed her job and her activities in the host laboratory to three motivated French students of 14-15 years.
