Abstract
Organic photoresponsive materials can undergo various reversible variations in certain physical and chemical properties, such as optical properties, electrochemical properties, conformation, and conductivity, upon photoirradiation. They have been widely applied in various optoelectronic fields, especially in information storage. We summarize research progress on organic photoresponsive materials for information storage. First, the design strategies and photoswitching mechanisms for various kinds of organic photoresponsive materials, including small organic molecules, metal complexes, polymers, supramolecules, and cholesteric liquid crystals, are systematically summarized. These materials exhibit reversible changes of absorption and/or emission properties in response to different wavelengths of light. Subsequently, the applications of these organic materials in information storage, such as data (re)writing and erasing, encryption and decryption, and anticounterfeiting, are introduced in detail. Finally, the current challenges and future directions in this rapidly growing research field are discussed. The review will provide important guidance on the future works about the design of excellent organic photoresponsive materials for optoelectronic applications.
Highlights
In the current era of “big data,” the rapid growth in the amount of data generated each year has created more demand for ultracapacity storage media.[1,2] At present, there are three mainstream modern information storage technologies, i.e., optical, magnetic, and semiconductor-based ones
The color and luminescence of the word had reversibly changed upon alternating exposure to UV and visible light owing to the reversible Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) on/off switching from RGB polymers 64 to 66 to dyes 62 [Fig. 4(b)], which indicates that full-color patterns can be successfully created by mixing three polymer dots (Pdots) at Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/Advanced-Photonics on 02 Nov 2021 Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use different proportions
Significant progress has been made in the development of organic photoresponsive materials for information storage
Summary
In the current era of “big data,” the rapid growth in the amount of data generated each year has created more demand for ultracapacity storage media.[1,2] At present, there are three mainstream modern information storage technologies, i.e., optical-, magnetic-, and semiconductor-based ones. Photoresponsive materials can be reversibly interconverted between two or more discrete states with obvious different optical outputs through alternating light irradiation, realizing the activation or erasure of encoded information.[13] Compared with the inorganic counterparts, organic photoresponsive materials exhibit unique advantages in light weight, low cost, good scalability, high flexibility, and compatibility with large-area solution-processing techniques including inkjet printing and screen printing.[14,15,16,17,18,19] More importantly, their storage characteristics can be adjusted through molecular design-cum-synthesis strategies.[14,15,16,17] various organic photoresponsive materials have been successfully applied to information storage and have become promising candidates for single-molecule information storage Their photoswitching characteristics usually depend on light-triggered isomerization of photochromic and/or photofluorochromic units such as ring opening-closure reaction and/or cis-trans isomerization, which result in variations at the molecular and macroscopic scale.[7,8,9,10,16,20,21]. The future challenges and opportunities in this field are illuminated
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