Recent Developments in Lanthanide Single-Molecule Magnets

Single-molecule magnets (SMMs) exhibiting slow relaxation of magnetization of purely molecular origin are highly attractive owing to their potential applications in spintronic devices, high-density information storage, and quantum computing. In particular, lanthanide SMMs have been playing a major role in the advancement of this field because of the large intrinsic magnetic anisotropy of lanthanide metal ions. Herein, some recent breakthroughs that are changing the perspective of the field are highlighted, with special emphasis on synthetic strategies towards the design of high-performance SMMs.