This talk is aimed at paying some homage to the beauty of spin polarisation phenomena exploited by chemists, physicists and biologists. Each system introduced will be shown to have been inspired by Nature’s ingenious designs either leading to (or proposing) significant advances in the synthesis of novel materials or boosting the sensitivity of spectroscopic techniques.
The talk certainly has no claim to introduce all faces of spin polarisation but it is focussed on our group’s work over the last decade. It will span areas as far as molecular wires, chemical compasses and animal magnetoreception.
Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) of photogenerated triplet states and chemical designs to control the spin’s delocalisation patterns are forming a significant part of the talk as does the discussion of spin correlated radical pairs in artificial photosynthetic reaction centres and magnetosensitive proteins - using both EPR and optical spectroscopies.