Eur. Phys. J. B 36, 169-173 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2003-00331-0

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

¹ Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Parma, 43100 Parma, Italy
² Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Università Politecnica delle Marche, 60131 Ancona, Italy

Corresponding author: ^a Giuseppe.Amoretti@fis.unipr.it

Received: 9 October 2003
Published online: 8 December 2003

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-[3×3] grid.