Dante Gatteschi: on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday
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Applied Magnetic Resonance
EDITORIAL
Dante Gatteschi: on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday Lorenzo Sorace1 · Maria Fittipaldi2 · Donatella Carbonera3
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
It is with great pleasure that we present this Special Issue of Applied Magnetic Resonance to celebrate the 75th birthday of Prof. Dante Gatteschi (Emeritus Professor at * Lorenzo Sorace [email protected] 1
Dipartimento di Chimica “U. Schiff” and UdR INSTM, University of Florence, Via della Lastruccia 3, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
2
Dipartimento di Fisica and UdR INSTM, University of Florence, via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
3
Department of Chemical Sciences, University of Padova, via Marzolo 1, Padova, Italy
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the University of Florence, Italy). Dante Gatteschi was born in Florence on October 27th, 1945. He graduated in Chemistry at the University of Florence in 1969, a time when in Italy there was no PhD program, under the guidance of Prof. Luigi Sacconi, founder of the School of Inorganic Chemistry in Florence. Soon after graduation, Dante Gatteschi became Assistant Professor at the University of Florence, where he spent all his academic career, becoming Professor of General and Inorganic Chemistry in 1980. He is Emeritus Professor of University of Florence since 2015. The research of Dante Gatteschi early focused on the use of ligand field theory for the interpretation of the spectro-magnetic properties of low symmetry transition metal compounds, a hot topic in the ’70s. The focus on copper(II) compounds undergoing Jahn–Teller distortion led him quite naturally to the application of EPR spectroscopy to understanding the static and dynamic structures of transition metal ions. The fundamental work performed on low symmetry Co(II) complexes still remains nowadays as unmissable. The natural extension of these investigations was towards systems in which metal ions are magnetically coupled, first in pairs, and later in more complex structures, such as oligonuclear systems and molecular chains. Again, the use of EPR in this area has been extensive, leading to the book he co-authored with Alessandro Bencini on “EPR of Exchange Coupled Systems”, which is a fundamental reference in the field. The development of the molecular magnetism research field lead Prof. Gatteschi to make large use of nitronyl nitroxide radicals, either as purely organic ferromagnets or as building blocks for more complex architectures: here EPR played again a pivotal role in determining the magnetic behaviour of these systems. A major breakthrough came in the ’90s, when the use of High Field High-Frequency EPR facility in Grenoble allowed Dante and his coworkers to elucidate the reasons which lead a dodecanuclear mixed-valence Manganese cluster to behave as a tiny magnet at very low temperature and to show unequivocal signatures of quantum tunnelling of the magnetization. This gave birth to the field of Single Molecule Magnetism, and provided much impulse to the
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