Search for: All records

Orbital angular momentum is a prerequisite for magnetic anisotropy, although in transition metal complexes it is typically quenched by the ligand field. By reducing the basicity of the carbon donor atoms in a pair of alkyl ligands, we synthesized a cobalt(II) dialkyl complex, Co(C(SiMe 2 ONaph) 3 ) 2 (where Me is methyl and Naph is a naphthyl group), wherein the ligand field is sufficiently weak that interelectron repulsion and spin-orbit coupling play a dominant role in determining the electronic ground state. Assignment of a non-Aufbau (d x 2 –y 2 , d xy ) 3 (d xz , d yz ) 3 (d z 2 ) 1 electron configuration is supported by dc magnetic susceptibility data, experimental charge density maps, and ab initio calculations. Variable-field far-infrared spectroscopy and ac magnetic susceptibility measurements further reveal slow magnetic relaxation via a 450–wave number magnetic excited state. 

Optical response of crystalline solids is to a large extent driven by excitations that promote electrons among individual bands. This allows one to apply optical and magneto‐optical methods to determine experimentally the energy band gap —a fundamental property crucial to our understanding of any solid—with a great precision. Here it is shown that such conventional methods, applied with great success to many materials in the past, do not work in topological Dirac semimetals with a dispersive nodal line. There, the optically deduced band gap depends on how the magnetic field is oriented with respect to the crystal axes. Such highly unusual behavior is explained in terms of band‐gap renormalization driven by Lorentz boosts which results from the Lorentz‐covariant form of the Dirac Hamiltonian relevant for the nodal line at low energies.