This book is intended to collect in one place as much information as possible on the use of EPR spectroscopy in the analysis of systems in which two or more spins are magnetically coupled. This is a field where research is very active and chemists are elbow-to-elbow with physicists and biologists in the forefront. Here, as in many other fields, the contributions coming from different disciplines are very important, but for active researchers it is sometimes difficult to follow the literature, due to differences in languages, and sources which are familiar to, e. g. , a physicist, are exotic to a chemist. Therefore, an effort is needed in order to provide a unitary description of the many different phenomena which are collected under the title. In order to define the arguments which are treated, it is useful to state clearly what is not contained here. So we do not treat magnetic phenomena in conductors and we neglect ferro- and antiferromagnetic resonance. The basic foundations of EPR spectroscopy are supposed to be known by the reader, while we introduce the basis of magnetic interactions between spins. In the first two chapters we review the foundations of exchange interactions, trying to show how the magnetic parameters are bound to the electronic structure of the interacting centers.

From chemistry to solid state physics to biology, the applications of Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) are relevant to many areas. This unified treatment is based on the spin Hamiltonian approach and makes extensive use of irreducible tensor techniques to analyze systems in which two or more spins are magnetically coupled. This edition contains a new Introduction by coauthor Dante Gatteschi, a pioneer and scholar of molecular magnetism.
The first two chapters review the foundations of exchange interactions, followed by examinations of the spectra of pairs and clusters, relaxation in oligonuclear species, approaches to infinite lattices, and how EPR can provide firsthand information on spin dynamics. Subsequent chapters explore experimental data, magnetically coupled systems, low-dimensional materials, and the use of EPR to characterize excitons and exciton motion. More than 200 figures and tables appear throughout the book, which concludes with a pair of helpful appendices.