Metal–Organic Frameworks in Modern Physics: Highlights and Perspectives

Owing to the synergistic combination of a hybrid organic-inorganic nature and a chemically active porous structure, metal-organic frameworks have emerged as a new class of crystalline materials. The current trend in the chemical industry is to utilize such crystals as flexible hosting elements for applications as diverse as gas and energy storage, filtration, catalysis, and sensing. From the physical point of view, metal-organic frameworks are considered molecular crystals with hierarchical structures providing the structure-related physical properties crucial for future applications of energy transfer, data processing and storage, high-energy physics, and light manipulation. Here, the perspectives of metal-organic frameworks as a new family of functional materials in modern physics are discussed: from porous metals and superconductors, topological insulators, and classical and quantum memory elements, to optical superstructures, materials for particle physics, and even molecular scale mechanical metamaterials. Based on complementary properties of crystallinity, softness, organic-inorganic nature, and complex hierarchy, a description of how such artificial materials have extended their impact on applied physics to become the mainstream in material science is offered.