Tian-Fu Liu,† Dan Fu,† Song Gao,*,† Yuan-Zhu Zhang,† Hao-Ling Sun,† Gang Su,‡ and Yong-Jiang Liu§

College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Materials Chemistry and Applications, Peking UniVersity, Beijing 100871, P.R. China, Department of Physics, The Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 3908, Beijing 100039, P.R. China, and State Key Laboratory of Coordination Chemistry, Nanjing UniVersity, Nanjing 210093, China

Received August 22, 2003; E-mail: gaosong@pku.edu.cn

Single-chain magnets (SCMs) are of high interest because of their unusual physical properties, and they open the possibility of potential use of one-dimensional (1D) magnetic molecular nanowires for information storage. A few samples are reported, and each of them contains heterospin in the chain.1 As a versatile bridge ligand, an azide ion can bind metal ions in a number of coordination modes, giving rise to a wide variety of molecular architectures from clusters to 3D compounds.2 Here we report a novel 1D helical chain complex, Co(bt)(N3)2 1 (bt ) 2,2′-bithiazoline), bridged by endon (EO) azides, which shows intrachain ferromagnetic coupling, slow relaxation of the magnetization, and hysteresis effects. It is the first example of a homospin SCM.