Macroscopic evidence of quantum coherent oscillations of the total spin in the Mn-[3x3] molecular nanomagnet

TL;DR

This paper provides macroscopic evidence of quantum coherent oscillations in the total spin of a Mn-[3x3] molecular nanomagnet, revealing new quantum effects related to spin magnitude fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces the theoretical investigation of quantum fluctuations in spin magnitude, a novel phenomenon in molecular nanomagnets, expanding understanding beyond spin direction tunnelling.

Findings

Evidence of quantum coherent oscillations in total spin magnitude

Theoretical prediction of macroscopic effects from spin state mixing

New insights into quantum phenomena in molecular nanomagnets

Abstract

Molecular nanomagnets, besides promising to open new frontiers in technology, have attracted huge interest in the scientific community because they can exhibit the phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling of the magnetization, i.e. coherent fluctuations of the direction of the total spin vector. In this paper we study a different quantum phenomenon involving fluctuations of the magnitude of the total spin vector. These fluctuations are related to the mixing between states with different spin quantum number, and imply new macroscopic effects, which we theoretically investigated in the Mn-[3x3] grid.