Blatter Radical-Decorated Silica as a Prospective Adsorbent for Selective NO Capture from Air.

Nitrogen oxides are adverse poisonous gases present in the atmosphere and having detrimental effects on the human health and environment. In this work, we propose a new type of mesoporous materials capable of capturing nitrogen monoxide (NO) from air. The designed material combines the robust Santa Barbara Amorphous-15 silica scaffold and ultrastable Blatter-type radicals acting as NO traps. Using in situ electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, we demonstrate that NO capture from air is selective and reversible at practical conditions, thus making Blatter radical-decorated silica highly promising for environmental applications.

Blatter-Radical-Grafted Mesoporous Silica as Prospective Nanoplatform for Spin Manipulation at Ambient Conditions.

Quantum computing and quantum information processing (QC/QIP) crucially depend on the availability of suitable quantum bits (qubits) and methods of their manipulation. Most qubit candidates known to date are not applicable at ambient conditions. Herein, we propose radical-grafted mesoporous silica as a versatile and prospective nanoplatform for spin-based QC/QIP. Extremely stable Blatter-type organic radicals are used, whose electron spin decoherence time is profoundly long even at room temperature (up to Tm ≈2.3 µs), thus allowing efficient spin manipulation by microwave pulses. The mesoporous structure of such composites is nuclear-spin free and provides additional opportunities of embedding guest molecules into the channels. Robustness and tunability of these materials promotes them as highly promising nanoplatforms for future QC/QIP developments.

Radical-Doped Metal-Organic Framework: Route to Nanoscale Defects and Magnetostructural Functionalities.

Nanosized structural defects in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) attract growing attention and often remarkably enhance functional properties of these materials for various applications. In this work, a series of MOFs [Cu2(TPTA)1- x(BDPBTR) x] (H4TPTA, [1,1':3',1″-terphenyl]-3,3'',5,5''-tetracarboxylic acid; H4BDPBTR, 1,3-bis(3,5-dicarboxyphenyl)-1,2,4-benzotriazin-4-yl radical)) with a new stable radical linker doped into the structure has been synthesized and investigated using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR). Mixed linkers H4TPTA and H4BDPBTR were used to bridge copper(II) paddle-wheel units into a porous framework, where H4BDPBTR is the close structural analogue of H4TPTA. MOFs with various x = 0-0.4 were investigated. EPR studies indicated that the radical linker binds to the copper(II) units differently compared to diamagnetic linker, resulting in the formation of nanosized structural defects. Moreover, remarkable kinetic phenomena were observed upon cooling of this MOF, where slow structural rearrangements and concomitant changes of magnetic interactions were induced. Thus, our findings demonstrate that doping of structurally mimicking radical linkers into MOFs represents an efficient approach for designing target nanosized defects and introducing new magnetostructural functionalities for a variety of applications.