Web Release Date: September 27,
Photochromic Polymer Composites for Two-Photon 3D Optical Data Storage
and
Department of Chemistry and CREOL, College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Orlando, Florida 32816, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901, Key Laboratory of Biomedical Photonics of Ministry of Education & Hubei Bioinformatics and Molecular Imaging Key Laboratory, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, People's Republic of China, and Institute of Physics, Prospect Nauki, 46, Kiev-28, 03028 Kiev, Ukraine
Received May 17, 2007
Revised Manuscript Received August 10, 2007
Abstract:
In this paper we demonstrate 3D two-photon recording and two-photon readout in photochromic polymer composites containing a mixture of 1,2-bis(2-methylbenzo[b]thiophen-3-yl)hexafluorocyclopentene (diarylethene 1) and fluorene derivatives 2,2'-(9,9-didecyl-9H-fluorene-2,7-diyl)bis(ethene-2,1-diyl)bis(4,1-phenylene)) dibenzo[d]thiazole (2) or poly(9,9-didecyl-2,7-dipheylaminofluorene) (3). The recording mechanism in this system is based on two-photon excitation of the closed form of diarylethene 1 at 800 nm. The readout mechanism is based on the modulation of the emission intensity of fluorene derivatives 2 or 3 by the closed form of diarylethene 1 through Resonance Energy Transfer (RET). Föster distances (R0) and critical concentrations (A0) were calculated from the spectral overlap of the donor's emission (fluorene derivatives) and the acceptor's absorption (closed form of diarylethene 1) in solution and in polymer films of PMMA-co-VBP. This system was demonstrated to be suitable for recording data by two-photon excitation in thick storage media. The RET-based readout method proved to be essentially nondestructive (exhibiting a loss of the initial fluorescence emission less than 20% of the initial emission after 10 000 readout cycles), providing a solution to a long-standing challenge in photochromic optical data storage.
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