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Published on: April 24, 2014
Prussian blue analogue CsFe[Cr(CN)(6)] as a matrix for the Fe(II) spin-crossover
Boris Le Guennic1, Serguei Borshch, Vincent Robert
1Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Laboratoire de Chimie, UMR 5182, 46 allée d'Italie, F-69364, Lyon, France.
Abstract:
The origin of the intriguing spin-transition behavior of the Prussian blue analogue cesium iron hexacyanochromate CsFe[Cr(CN)6] has been investigated by means of correlated ab initio CASPT2 calculations. Using the smallest transiting core [Fe(NC)6]4-, the relative importance of the local ligand field and the Madelung field generated by the rest of the crystal was estimated. It is shown that in the presence of a frozen-charge environment, the high-spin state lies lower in energy than the low-spin state, thus excluding the possibility of observing a spin transition. In contrast, the charge reorganization in the environment evaluated from unrestricted periodic Hartree-Fock calculations creates a prerequisite for the spin-transition phenomenon. The influence of the disorder in the cesium ions' positions on the spin transition has been examined as a possible stabilizing factor of the low-spin state of [Fe(NC)6]4-. It is concluded that this experimentally observed disorder cannot account solely for the unprecedented behavior of the CsFe[Cr(CN)6] compound.
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