Grinding enhances the magnetic hardness of heterometallic diruthenium(ii,iii) carbonates with a kagome lattice structure.

The assembly of paddle-wheel Ru building units affords a new trimetallic carbonate, CsCd(HO)[{Cd(HO)}{Ru(CO)}]·10HO (1), that contains structurally near-perfect kagome layers, {Ru(CO)}, linked by octahedral Cd(HO) into a nanoscale kagome network exhibiting ferromagnetic ordering below 3.5 K. The investigation of influences of the grinding method on the crystal samples of compound 1 reveals that the coercivity increases from ∼2.5 Oe to 44.0 Oe upon a grinding treatment for 180 minutes. The results demonstrate that compound 1 can vary from a soft magnet to a hard magnet simply by manually grinding the crystal samples to the nanoscale.