Photosensitive Cholesteric Copolymers with Spiropyran-Containing Side Groups: Novel Materials for Optical Data Recording

Abstract

The thermal and chemical reversibility of the photochromic process displayed by spiropyran (see Figure) is combined with the helical supramolecular architecture of a cholesteric polymer to produce a copolymer that can be used for reversible data recording on colored backgrounds. The cholesteric structure is able to reflect a broad spectrum of visible light, which should allow the realization of the special filters and reflectors required for complex multicolor optical display devices.

Structural Analysis of Spiropyran Polimers using ATR Spectroscopy

“…Infrared and Raman vibration techniques, help us to visualize the interactions between molecules (SP, solvent and polymeric base). Infrared 1,[3][4][5][6] and Raman 4,6 spectrometries studies have been used to observe the conformational and intermolecular interactions between the polymeric base and the spyropiran. Others works analized the solvent polarity effects into spyropiran molecule, using only the absorption spectrum of the structure [7][8][9] .…”

“…Spiropyran (SP), have a great potential for applications in optical devices, for example as data storage films and waveguides 1,2 , principally because of their physical and chemical properties would be controlled by laser illumination. In general, SP absorbs in the ultra violet (UV) region and not in the visible region.…”

Linear and Hyperpolarizabilities of Spiropyran and Derivatives

“…Photochromic materials are of interest to a variety of potential applications including high resolution photography, optical devices [2,3], holographic systems, variable transmission devices as lenses and filters, and erasable memory media [4,5]. The photochromic polymers have many advantages in the manufacture of organic devices for integrated optics as the flexibility of ac- * e-mail: mkhsabra@aec.org.sy commodating different chromophores [6,7] and the possibility of combining two different properties in the same matrix.…”

Fast response photochromic textiles from hybrid silica surface coating

“…This material has been in use in ophthalmic lenses and potential applications can be found in areas such as rewritable optical recording media [3][4][5][6][7], data memory [8][9][10][11][12][13][14], optical switches [11,13,[15][16][17], and sensors [18][19][20][21]. The use of photo-chromism in textiles will create new opportunities to develop smart garments capable of blocking UV radiation and/or sensing environmental changes, as well as displaying fancy colour-changing effects [22][23][24][25].…”