A Suzuki Approach to Quinone-Based Diarylethene Photochromes

Future-Oriented Advanced Diarylethene Photoswitches: From Molecular Design to Spontaneous Assembly Systems

Diarylethene (DAE) photoswitch is a new and promising family of photochromic molecules and has shown superior performance as a smart trigger in stimulus-responsive materials. During the past few decades, the DAE family has achieved a leap from simple molecules to functional molecules and developed toward validity as a universal switching building block. In recent years, the introduction of DAE into an assembly system has been an attractive strategy that enables the photochromic behavior of the building blocks to be manifested at the level of the entire system, beyond the DAE unit itself. This assembly-based strategy will bring many unexpected results that promote the design and manufacture of a new generation of advanced materials. Here, recent advances in the design and fabrication of diarylethene as a trigger in materials science, chemistry, and biomedicine are reviewed.

Computational and Crystallographic Examination of Naphthoquinone Based Diarylethene Photochromes

Photochromic compounds have a lengthy history of study and a profusion of applications that stand to gain from these studies. Among the classes of photochromic compounds, diarylethenes show desirable properties including high fatigue resistance and thermal stability, thus meeting some of the most important criteria necessary to enter the realm of practical applications. Recently, photochromic diarylethenes containing quinone functionalities have demonstrated interesting optical and solid-state properties. When properly interfaced with suitable electron withdrawing groups on the aryl component, both the ring-opening and ring-closing reactions can be achieved with visible light; this is in contrast to most other diarylethenes where UV light is required for ring closure. Unfortunately, quantitative conversion from open to closed forms is not possible. In this work, we examine the relative energies of conformations of solid-state structures observed by X-ray crystallography and evaluate their thermal stabilities based on density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Time-dependent DFT (TD–DFT) is used to model the UV-vis absorption spectra of these quinone diarylethenes. We show that spectral overlap between open and closed forms is a major hindrance to full photoconversion.

Light-controlled self-assembly of a dithienylethene bolaamphiphile in water

In this work, we report the light-driven self-assembly of photochromic dithienylethene bolaamphiphiles in aqueous media. The open → closed transition that occurred upon irradiation was accompanied by the formation of 1D nanofibers.