When applying photochromic switches as functional units in light-responsive materials or devices, an often disregarded yet crucial property is their resistance to fatigue during photoisomerization. In the large family of diarylethene photoswitches, formation of an annulated isomer as a byproduct of the photochromic reaction turns out to prevent the desired high reversibility for many different ...

Absorbance-Modulation-Optical Lithography (AMOL) enables super-resolution optical lithography by simultaneous illumination of a photochromic film by a bright spot at one wavelength, λ1 and a node at another wavelength, λ2. A deep subwavelength region of the transparent photochromic isomer is created in the vicinity of the node. Light at λ1 penetrates this region and exposes an underlying photor...

We newly synthesized various sized gold nanoparticles covered with photochromic polymers consisting of diarylethenes with various structures to investigate an effect of the gold nanoparticles on the photocycloreversion reaction of the diarylethene chromophores upon irradiation with visible light. The gold nanoparticles covered with the photochromic polymers exhibited reversible changes in local...

Aryl sulfonamides are a widely used drug class for the inhibition of carbonic anhydrases. In the context of our program of photochromic pharmacophores we were interested in the exploration of azobenzene-containing sulfonamides to block the catalytic activity of human carbonic anhydrase II (hCAII). Herein, we report the synthesis and in vitro evaluation of a small library of nine photochromic su...

We have studied light-induced birefringence (LIB) and surface relief grating (SRG) formation in the series of methylacrylate polymers. The effect of material structure such as length of photochromic side chain, glass transition temperature and molecular structure of azo units on LIB and SRG are studied. The optical formation of self-induced SRG on films of these materials is also presented.

A novel photochromic diarylethene bearing a pyrimidine moiety, 1-(2,4-dimethoxyl-5-pyrimidinyl)-2-[2methyl-5-(3-methyl)-3-thienyl]perfluorocyclopentene has been synthesized. Its properties, including photochromic and fluorescent behaviors, have been investigated. The compound exhibited remarkable photochromism, changing from colorless to red after irradiation with UV light in solution. The cycl...

The title compound, C(61)H(68)F(8)O(2)S(2), is a photochromic liquid crystal based on diaryl-ethene as photoswitchable unit. The F atoms connected to the benzene rings are disordered over two positions; the site-occupation factors refined to 0.830 (3)/0.170 (3). The mol-ecule adopts a photo-active anti-parallel conformation and the distance between the two reactive C atoms of the thio-phene rin...

Quartz surfaces and colloidal silica particles were derivatized with a poly(methyl methacrylate) copolymer containing spirobenzopyran (SP) photochromic molecules in the pendant groups at a concentration of 20 mol %. Two-photon near-IR excitation (approximately 780 nm) was then used to create chemically distinct patterns on the modified surfaces through a photochromic process of SP transformatio...

We performed numerical investigations of surface plasmon excitation and propagation in structures made of a photochromic polymer layer deposited over a metal surface using the finite-difference time-domain method. We investigated the process of light coupling into surface plasmon polariton excitation using surface relief gratings formed on the top of a polymer layer and compared it with the cou...