First-Principles Investigations of Magnetic Anisotropy and Spin-Crossover Behavior of Fe(III)-TBP Complexes

With the ongoing efforts to obtain mononuclear 3d-transition metal complexes that manifest slow relaxation of magnetization and hence, can behave as single molecule magnets (SMMs), we have modelled 14 novel Fe(III) complexes out of which nine behave as potential SMMs. These complexes possess large zero-field splitting (ZFS)

parameter D in the range of -40 to -60 cm^-1. The first-principles investigation of the ground-spin state applying density functional theory (DFT) and wave-function based

multi-configurations methods e.g. SA-CASSCF/NEVPT2 are found to be quite consistent except for few delicate cases with near degenerate spin-states. In such cases, the

hybrid B3LYP functional is found to be biased towards high-spin (HS) state. Altering the percentage of exact exchange admixed in B3LYP functional leads to intermediate spin

(IS) ground state consistent with the multireference calculations. The origin of large zero field splitting (ZFS) in the Fe(III)-based trigonal bipyramidal (TBP) complexes

is investigated and the D-values are further tuned by varying the axial ligands with group XV elements (N, P and As) and equatorial halide ligands from F, Cl, Br and I. Furthermore, a number of complexes are identified with very small Gibbs free energy values indicating the possible spin-crossover phenomenon between the bi-stable spin-states.