Multifunctional coordination compounds: design and properties

Cleverly designed molecular building blocks provide chemists with the tools of a powerful molecular-scale construction set. They enable them to engine er materials that have a predictable order and useful solid-state propertie s. Hence, it is in the realm of supramolecular chemistry to follow a strate gy for synthesizing materials that combine a selected set of properties, fo r instance from the areas of magnetism, photophysics and electronics. As a possible approach, host-guest solids that are based on extended anionic, ho mo- and bi-metallic oxalato-bridged transition-metal compounds with two- an d three-dimensional connectivities are investigated. In particular, we repo rt in detail about their structural properties and their multifunctional ch aracteristics in the area of molecular magnetism and photophysics.