Design of Magnetic Coordination Polymers Built from Polyoxalamide Ligands: A Thirty Year Story

The aim of this review is to pay tribute to the legacy of O. Kahn. Kahn's credo was to synthesize magnetic compounds with predictable structure and magnetic properties. This is illustrated herein with results obtained by Kahn's group during his Orsay period thirty years ago, but also on the basis of our recent results on the synthesis of coordination polymers with oxamate ligands. The first part of this review is devoted to a short description of the necessary knowledge in physics and theoretical chemistry that Kahn and his group have used to select oxamate ligands, the complex‐as‐ligand strategy and the synthesis of heterobimetallic systems. Then, we describe the strategies we have later used to obtain the desired target compounds. The use of complexes as building‐blocks, associated to a control of the metal ions chirality and stoichiometry, allowed us to obtain coordination polymers with predictable dimensionality. For the synthesis of single‐chain magnets (SCMs) we show that the ligand chemical flexibility makes the isolation of the chains in the solid and the occurence of slow magnetic relaxation possible. For 1D and 2D molecule‐based magnets (MBMs), the magnetic ordering strongly depends on the interchain or interplane interactions, which are difficult to control. Again the flexibility of the oxamate ligands allowed their strengthening in the solid sate, yielding MBMs with critical temperatures up to 30 K. We will also present our results on 3D coordination polymers, particularly on the porous magnets displaying large octagonal channels. This family of porous MBMs possess outstanding chemical properties, such as post‐synthetic transformation in the solid state. Finally, we will also show that oxamate ligands allows the design of multifunctional materials, as in the case of the first chiral SCM. Overall, the results presented in this review show the impressive potential the oxamate ligands have for the design of coordination polymers. In dedication to Olivier Kahn's scientific legacy, his rational approach to the design of molecular magnets combining physics, theoretical chemistry and synthesis chemistry, this review describes the scientific journey that has allowed for the controlled synthesis of 1D, 2D and 3D coordination polymers using oxamate and oxamidate ligands.