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Updated: Dec 8, 2025

Isotopic Effect in Double Proton Transfer Process of Porphycene Investigated by Enhanced QM/MM Method
Published on: July 19, 2019
Precise Control of π-Electron Magnetism in Metal-Free Porphyrins
Yan Zhao1, Kaiyue Jiang2, Can Li1
1Key Laboratory of Artificial Structures and Quantum Control (Ministry of Education), Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Abstract:
The porphyrin macrocycle can stabilize a set of magnetic metal ions, thus introducing localized net spins near the center. However, it remains elusive but most desirable to introduce delocalized spins in porphyrins with wide implications, for example, for building correlated quantum spins. Here, we demonstrate that metal-free porphyrins host delocalized π-electron magnetism, as revealed by scanning probe microscopy and a different level of theory calculations. Our results demonstrate that engineering of π-electron topologies introduces a spin-polarized singlet state and delocalized net spins in metal-free porphyrins. In addition, the π-electron magnetism can be switched on/off via scanning tunneling microscope manipulation by tuning the interfacial charge transfer. Our results provide an effective way to precisely control the π-electron magnetism in metal-free porphyrins, which can be further extended to design new magnetic functionalities of porphyrin-based architectures.
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