Research News

Photoswitching and thermal switching properties allow writing by irradiation or heat and erasing by visible light

Beginning to see the light

UV light writes the Chinese character for “light” on treated paper, which then gets erased after irradiation with visible light. A soldering iron then makes marks on treated paper that are erased with visible light irradiation.

Credit: Osaka Metropolitan University

In this age of cloud storage, few people are backing up data on CD-RWs. The technology to rewrite data on compact discs was made possible by phase-change materials altered by the light and heat of lasers, though this had a limit of 1,000 rewrites. Today, scientists investigating photoswitching molecules, which change their properties when irradiated, have been finding possible applications for these materials, ranging from photopharmacology to data storage.

Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Engineering student Shota Hamatani, Dr. Daichi Kitagawa, a lecturer, and Professor Seiya Kobatake synthesized aza-diarylethenes, which have nitrogen in place of carbon in a molecular structure similar to known photoswitching diarylethenes. The new aza-diarylethenes exhibited not only photoswitching, but thermal switching as well.

They demonstrated that the new photoswitching molecules can be used as a rewritable recording medium, using light or heat to write, and erasing with light.

“Our findings are very useful for the development of switching molecules that can be reversibly altered not only by light, but also by heat,” Dr. Kitagawa proclaimed. “They may also lead to the development of new functional materials.”

The findings were published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Funding

This work was partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP22J21941 (S.H.), JP21KK0092, JP23K26619, JP24K01458 (D.K.), and JP21H02016 (S.K.), and Iketani Science and Technology Foundation (D.K).

Paper information

Journal: Angewandte Chemie International Edition
Title: Aza-Diarylethenes Undergoing Both Photochemically and Thermally Reversible Electrocyclic Reactions
DOI: 10.1002/anie.202414121
Authors: Shota Hamatani, Daichi Kitagawa, and Seiya Kobatake
Published: 28 August 2024
URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202414121

Contact

Graduate School of Engineering

Daichi Kitagawa
Email: kitagawa[at]omu.ac.jp

Seiya Kobatake
Email: kobatake[at]omu.ac.jp

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