Metal-organic frameworks, commonly abbreviated as MOFs, are built from metal atoms or clusters connected by organic molecules into highly ordered, repeating lattices. The geometry of these connections produces structures riddled with pores measured in fractions of a nanometre, giving MOFs an enormous internal surface area relative to their mass. That porosity is the key structural feature that creates the internal space necessary for MOFs to interact with target molecules, which is why the materials are under intense investigation for applications ranging from gas storage and separation to sensing, catalysis, bio-imaging, and magnetic materials. Because both the metal nodes and the organic linkers can be varied, MOFs have long been regarded as among the most customisable classes of solid materials in modern chemistry.

The new material, designated UoB-116, belongs to a subset of the MOF family built around rare-earth metals. In the first stage of the study, the researchers created and structurally characterised fifteen individual versions of the framework, each incorporating a different rare-earth metal. This step established that the underlying structure was robust enough to accommodate a wide range of metal ions without collapsing or losing its crystalline order. The team then moved to progressively more complex compositions, combining two, four, twelve, and finally fifteen different metals within the same framework, demonstrating at each stage that the crystal retained its ordered architecture.

The final and most striking step was the addition of indium, a metal drawn from outside the rare-earth family. The resulting MOF contained sixteen different metals simultaneously: yttrium, indium, and fourteen of the lanthanides. According to the researchers, UoB-116 is the first reported MOF to combine metals drawn from three different regions of the periodic table — the d-block, the p-block, and the f-block — within a single framework. That breadth of chemical compatibility is what gives the material its mix-and-match character, allowing elements with very different electronic structures to sit side by side in one ordered lattice.

To show that this compositional freedom translates into functional control, the team focused on two of the sixteen metals, dysprosium and lanthanum, and systematically varied the balance between them. The results were unambiguous. Increasing the dysprosium content increased the material’s magnetic response, while the characteristic near-infrared light absorption associated with dysprosium could be adjusted simply by altering its concentration. Porosity responded in the opposite direction: adding more lanthanum progressively reduced the material’s measured surface area. Most dramatically, the amount of carbon dioxide the material could take up under the conditions tested fell from 5.72 millimoles per gram for the all-dysprosium version to 1.23 millimoles per gram for the all-lanthanum version — a demonstration that gas-storage behaviour can be changed by adjusting the metals alone, with no change to the framework’s underlying architecture.

Corresponding author Professor Neil Champness of the University of Birmingham framed the advance as a step toward materials that behave almost like software. “Our findings confirm a route towards ‘programmable’ porous materials, where scientists could choose a combination of metals to dial magnetic, optical, chemical, or gas-adsorption behaviour,” he said. “The ability to predict how strongly particular metals will be incorporated potentially offers much finer control over future multi-metal materials. Rather than having to invent a completely new material every time they want different properties, researchers can potentially change the metallic ‘recipe’ within the same underlying structure.”

That question of predictability is central to why the work matters beyond its record-setting composition. In many multicomponent materials, different metal ions compete for the same structural sites in ways that are difficult to anticipate, and the final distribution of metals can be chaotic. The Birmingham-led team reports that the incorporation of particular metals into UoB-116 follows a bias linked to the radius of the cations, meaning that how strongly each metal is taken up into the framework can be predicted from its ionic size. If that predictive relationship holds across other metal combinations, it would give chemists a design rule for dialling in specific property profiles rather than discovering them by trial and error.

The practical stakes are considerable, because MOFs already serve as custom molecular sponges across several major industries. In clean energy, they are studied for compact hydrogen storage in fuel-cell vehicles and for selective carbon capture from industrial emissions. In environmental safety, related frameworks are being explored for harvesting drinkable water from arid air and for the safe storage of toxic gases used in semiconductor manufacturing. In industrial chemistry, energy-saving adsorptive separations based on MOFs could replace cryogenic distillation, one of the most energy-intensive unit operations in the chemical industry. In biomedicine, high-capacity frameworks are being developed for targeted drug delivery and as imaging contrast agents. A single tunable platform that can be re-optimised for each of these tasks by swapping metals could dramatically shorten development cycles.

The study, titled “Rare-Earth Multivariate Metal–Organic Frameworks: Cationic Radius Biased Compositional Control and Property Tuning,” was led by Adnan Ishaq and Professor Neil R. Champness at Birmingham, with contributions from Joseph O. Ogar, Asif Raza, Danielle E. Schier, Stephen P. Argent, Musa M. Mahmud, Lucy Clark, Jacob L. Brownlee, and Soumya Mukherjee across the collaborating institutions. The work appeared in Angewandte Chemie on 26 September 2026, and its publication marks one of the most extensive demonstrations yet of compositional control in a multivariate framework.

For the broader field of materials chemistry, UoB-116 offers a proof of concept that the boundary between designing new materials and tuning existing ones can be blurred. If the same principle — a robust framework that tolerates many metals in predictable proportions — can be extended to other linker chemistries and other metal families, the result could be a generation of porous materials whose properties are specified on demand: more magnetic here, more porous there, tuned for carbon capture or near-infrared optics by nothing more than a change in the recipe. For now, the sixteen-metal framework stands as evidence that the periodic table itself can be treated as a palette, and that the next breakthrough material may not need to be built from scratch at all.

Subject of Research: Multivariate rare-earth metal-organic frameworks with tunable properties through compositional control of incorporated metals

Article Title: ‘Mix-and-match’ material’s properties can be tuned by changing its metallic ‘recipe’

Article References: ‘Mix-and-match’ material’s properties can be tuned by changing its metallic ‘recipe’. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: metal-organic frameworks, MOFs, rare-earth metals, lanthanides, porous materials, gas storage, carbon capture, magnetism, light absorption, materials chemistry, University of Birmingham, Angewandte Chemie

The underlying physics begins in the kiln. When a clay vessel is fired at high temperature, the magnetic particles embedded in the clay are heated beyond their ability to hold any prior magnetic record. As the pot cools, these particles align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field prevailing at that moment, and once cooled below a critical temperature, the alignment becomes permanently fixed. This permanent record is known as thermal remanent magnetism. For a pot made today, that record points toward today’s magnetic north pole; for a rock that cooled 800,000 years ago, when the Earth’s field was reversed, the tiny magnetic crystals point toward the south pole. In principle, this imprint offers a timestamp of the original firing.

In practice, however, the direction of a magnetic signal alone cannot reveal a sample’s age, because the recorded direction depends entirely on how the object happened to be oriented as it cooled. Hold a sherd one way and its signal appears to point north; rotate it and the same signal seems to point south or in any number of other directions. Archaeologists have long used magnetic direction and intensity to date in-place features such as hearths and walls, where orientation is known, but a loose pot on a dealer’s table offers no such reference frame. Forgers, meanwhile, have grown increasingly sophisticated, and museums have lacked a reliable laboratory test that works on an object of unknown orientation and uncertain provenance.

The Scripps team’s breakthrough came from separating two distinct kinds of magnetism that coexist in fired clay. The first, thermal remanent magnetism, is carried by the larger magnetic particles, whose signals settle permanently into the direction of the field at the time of firing and remain trapped there essentially forever. The second, called viscous remanent magnetism, is carried by the smallest particles, whose magnetic moments never fully stabilize. Instead, these tiny grains continually re-equilibrate with the ambient geomagnetic field, so their magnetism drifts and fluctuates over time in response to the field’s slow changes. Crucially, this viscous component is the part that accumulates after manufacture, and it is the part that can be erased and reset by reheating.

That erasability is the key to the new test. When pottery is reheated in the laboratory, the viscous remanent magnetization can be wiped away, and the temperature required to erase it depends on how long the material has been sitting in the Earth’s field. The newer the pottery, the lower the temperature needed to reset its viscous signal. The researchers exploited this relationship by heating a variety of pottery objects at progressively higher temperatures, starting at 50 degrees Celsius and increasing in increments of 10 degrees. Their sample set included vessels known to be thousands of years old, souvenir pottery purchased in shops around Jerusalem, and objects already known to be fakes.

The results revealed a clear and statistically significant divide between modern and ancient material. Samples older than roughly 1,000 years retained their viscous magnetization until temperatures rose above 112 degrees Celsius, whereas modern samples lost their viscous signal at lower temperatures. In other words, the viscous component of an ancient pot carries a distinct thermal threshold, a kind of magnetic timestamp that a recently fired forgery simply cannot reproduce. A forger who bakes clay today, no matter how carefully the vessel is styled or artificially aged, produces a viscous magnetization profile characteristic of the present day, and the new method detects that discrepancy directly.

Establishing the 112-degree threshold required more than laboratory heating experiments. The team supplemented their measurements with micromagnetic models that simulated the baking of hypothetical samples over varying spans of time, tracking how the viscous signal builds and decays in ensembles of magnetic grains. Such simulations are computationally demanding, and the authors note that computing power had long been insufficient to run them at the necessary resolution. Advances in processing capability finally made it possible to model the behavior of the smallest magnetic particles realistically, allowing the researchers to connect the laboratory observations to a quantitative criterion that can be applied to artifacts of unknown age.

The practical implications extend across several communities. Vaknin expressed hope that the method will serve museum curators who wish to display only authentic artifacts, archaeologists and historians studying the societies that created ancient objects, and law enforcement authorities working to eliminate the illicit antiquities trade, which involves both the looting of archaeological sites and outright forgery. The authors point out that a recent prosecution in Israel involving the sale of fake artifacts had failed because of a lack of conclusive evidence, underscoring how badly courts need an objective, physically grounded test. Because the method yields a measurable temperature threshold rather than a subjective judgment of style or surface patina, it has the potential to stand up as proof in forgery trials.

Co-author Lisa Tauxe, a geoscientist at Scripps, said the team’s technique could be a boon to museums and governments that need to stay one step ahead of forgers. Fakes, she noted, have been an enduring problem in Israel, China, Mexico, and almost every region of the world where archaeological dig sites are found, particularly in places where treachery abounds. The antiquities market is vast and often opaque, and objects can acquire convincing provenances through forged documentation alone. A laboratory test that interrogates the physical fabric of the artifact itself, independent of paperwork or stylistic opinion, offers a fundamentally different kind of evidence, one rooted in the immutable physics of magnetic grains and the slow drift of the geomagnetic field.

With the method now established, the researchers intend to apply it to artifacts of debated authenticity in museums around the world. The work, authored by Vaknin, Tauxe, former Scripps doctoral student Brendan Cych, and geoscientist Jeff Gee, was supported by funding from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation. For a field that has long relied on connoisseurship, provenance records, and stylistic analysis to separate genuine antiquities from clever imitations, the ability to read a magnetic timestamp directly from fired clay marks a meaningful shift. Every ancient pot, it turns out, carries within its smallest grains a quiet record of the centuries it has spent in the Earth’s magnetic field, and for the first time, that record can be interrogated with enough precision to unmask a forgery.

Subject of Research: A magnetic dating method for authenticating ancient fired-clay artifacts

Article Title: Researchers develop method to tell authentic artifacts from fakes

Article References: Researchers develop method to tell authentic artifacts from fakes. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: archaeology, pottery, forgery detection, magnetism, viscous remanent magnetization, thermal remanent magnetism, geomagnetic field, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, PNAS, antiquities trade, museum authentication, micromagnetic modeling

The central obstacle the researchers had to overcome was a practical one that has haunted the nickelate field since its inception. Neutron scattering is the gold-standard technique for measuring magnetic order and spin excitations in solids, because neutrons carry magnetic moments and scatter off the spins in a crystal in a way that reveals their spatial arrangement and their energy spectrum. But neutrons interact weakly with matter, so the technique demands large, high-quality single crystals, often measured in batches. Growing such crystals of La3Ni2O7 proved extraordinarily difficult, and progress on the magnetic ground state of this pivotal compound had been correspondingly slow. By assembling a mosaic of single crystals large enough for spectroscopy, the team cleared the single biggest experimental bottleneck in the field and opened the door to a definitive measurement.

What they found in the static magnetic order was a single-stripe pattern. In stripe order, spins arrange themselves into periodic antiferromagnetic bands separated by domain walls, a configuration familiar from certain layered nickel oxides and from doped cuprates, where stripes have long been suspected of playing a role in pairing. The observation of single-stripe order in the parent compound of a high-temperature nickelate superconductor is significant because it tells theorists what magnetic texture the electrons naturally want to form before superconductivity is induced by pressure. The order also coexists with a finite spin gap, meaning there is an energy threshold below which magnetic fluctuations are suppressed, a feature that shapes how the material can respond when superconductivity sets in.

The dynamical measurements revealed an equally rich picture. The spin excitations of La3Ni2O7 are anisotropic within the plane, meaning their energies and intensities depend on the direction of travel through the crystal lattice, a direct fingerprint of the stripe arrangement. More strikingly, the excitations show pronounced modulation along the direction perpendicular to the layers, revealing that the two nickel oxide planes in each bilayer are antiferromagnetically coupled to one another. This interlayer coupling is not a minor detail. In the bilayer structure of La3Ni2O7, the coupling between the paired planes is widely believed to be central to the superconducting mechanism under pressure, with several theoretical works proposing that interlayer exchange drives the pairing interaction. The neutron data now provide direct experimental grounding for that picture in the magnetic sector.

To make quantitative sense of the spectra, the team compared their measurements against a bilayer Heisenberg-type model, the standard theoretical framework for describing localized spins coupled within and between layers. The model captures the measured dispersion, the relationship between excitation energy and momentum, provided it includes strong interlayer exchange and competing in-plane couplings. That the data are well described by such a model does not mean the material is a simple insulator of localized moments; rather, it gives theorists a concrete set of exchange parameters extracted from experiment, replacing the guesswork that has plagued model calculations of the nickelate phase diagram. The competing in-plane couplings in particular hint at the delicate energy balance that pressure must tip to produce superconductivity.

Perhaps the most consequential result concerns the absolute intensity of the magnetic fluctuations, not merely their energies. By carefully normalizing the measured scattering cross sections, the researchers could compare the strength of spin fluctuations in La3Ni2O7 directly with those in cuprate superconductors. The spin-wave bandwidth, the total energy range over which well-defined spin waves propagate, turned out to be only about twenty-five percent of the corresponding bandwidth in the cuprates. On its face, that might suggest the nickelate is a much weaker magnet. But the local dynamic susceptibility, a measure of the fluctuating moment summed over momentum space, tells a different story: at comparable energies, the susceptibility in the nickelate is enhanced relative to the cuprates, so that the total fluctuating moment is comparable between the two families.

This combination, a narrow bandwidth but intense mid-energy fluctuations, points to substantial electronic correlations in the nickelate and to a distribution of magnetic spectral weight that differs fundamentally from the cuprate case. In the cuprates, spin excitations extend to very high energies, several hundred millielectronvolts, reflecting the large superexchange interaction between copper spins. In La3Ni2O7, the spectral weight is concentrated at intermediate energies, which matters because theories of unconventional superconductivity generally hold that spin fluctuations in a particular energy window provide the glue that binds electrons into Cooper pairs. A material whose fluctuations are intense precisely in the mid-energy range may pair electrons through a mechanism that is qualitatively related to, but quantitatively distinct from, the cuprate mechanism.

The findings arrive at a moment of extraordinary ferment in the nickelate field. Since the initial report of superconductivity near 80 kelvin in pressurized La3Ni2O7 in 2023, and the subsequent demonstrations of ambient-pressure superconductivity in thin films and of bulk superconductivity up to 96 kelvin in pressurized nickelate single crystals, researchers have been racing to determine whether nickelates constitute a genuinely new route to high-temperature superconductivity or a variation on the cuprate theme. The magnetic measurements now reported sharpen that debate considerably. The single-stripe order, the strong bilayer coupling, and the mid-energy-weighted fluctuation spectrum together constitute a magnetic framework that is distinct from the cuprates, even as the presence of strong correlations and antiferromagnetism echoes the older family.

For the immediate future, the study sets a benchmark. Any credible theory of superconductivity in La3Ni2O7 must now reproduce a spin excitation spectrum with these specific features: a finite spin gap, anisotropic in-plane dispersions governed by competing exchanges, bilayer modulation from antiferromagnetic interlayer coupling, and an absolute fluctuating moment comparable to that of the cuprates despite a much reduced bandwidth. The work also demonstrates a methodology, mosaic neutron spectroscopy on carefully grown crystals, that can now be extended to chemically substituted and pressurized variants, tracing how the magnetic framework evolves as superconductivity emerges. In a field where the pairing mechanism remains unsettled, knowing precisely what the parent compound’s spins are doing is the essential first step toward understanding what happens when those spins conspire to superconduct.

Subject of Research: Magnetic order and spin excitations in the bilayer nickelate La3Ni2O7, the parent compound of a high-temperature nickelate superconductor

Article Title: Single-stripe magnetic order and bilayer spin dynamics in single-crystalline La3Ni2O7

Article References: Chen, L., Zhang, E., Hao, Y., Zhu, Y., Cui, B., Abernathy, D. L., Williams, T. J., Ikeda, Y., Zhang, H., Liu, F., Wang, W., Wang, Q., & Zhao, J. (2026). Single-stripe magnetic order and bilayer spin dynamics in single-crystalline La3Ni2O7. Nature Materials. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-026-02768-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41563-026-02768-3

Keywords: nickelate superconductors, La3Ni2O7, neutron scattering, stripe magnetic order, spin excitations, bilayer coupling, spin gap, high-temperature superconductivity, strong correlations, Heisenberg model, dynamic susceptibility, magnetism