pH Tuning of Water-Soluble Arylazopyrazole Photoswitches.

Arylazopyrazoles are an emerging class of photoswitches with redshifted switching wavelength, high photostationary states, long thermal half-lives and facile synthetic access. Understanding pathways for a simple modulation of the thermal half-lives, while keeping other parameters of interest constant, is an important aspect for out-of-equilibrium systems design and applications. Here, it is demonstrated that the thermal half-life of a water-soluble PEG-tethered arylazo-bis(o-methylated)pyrazole (AAP) can be tuned by more than five orders of magnitude using simple pH adjustment, which is beyond the tunability of azobenzenes. The mechanism of thermal relaxation is investigated by thorough spectroscopic analyses and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Finally, the concepts of a tunable half-life are transferred from the molecular scale to the material scale. Based on the photochromic characteristics of E- and Z-AAP, transient information storage is showcased in form of light-written patterns inside films cast from different pH, which in turn leads to different times of storage. With respect to prospective precisely tunable materials and time-programmed out-of-equilibrium systems, an externally tunable half-life is likely advantageous over changing the entire system by the replacement of the photoswitch.

Molecular dynamics simulation of water diffusion in MFI-type zeolites.

Molecular dynamics simulation using COMPASS force field has been employed to understand the dynamics of water diffusion and structuring in silicalite-1 and Na-ZSM-5 (Si/Al = 95 and 191) samples at three different temperatures, 297, 354, and 393 K, at a water loading of 8 molecules per unit cell, in canonical ensemble. Diffusion coefficients were significantly reduced upon the introduction of aluminum atoms into the framework, together with charge balancing cations placed in their vicinity, since the ion-dipole interactions dominant in ZSM-5 samples are stronger than the H-bond interactions in silicalite-1. The activation energy of diffusion increased with decreasing Si/Al ratio. In the silicalite-1 and ZSM-5 samples, straight channels were observed to be preferred than the sinusoidal ones and the channel preference was not observed to be a strong function of either temperature or the Si/Al ratio. The ordered structures of the water molecules, forming clusters in the channels of silicalite-1 at low temperature was observed to be broken to some extent by increased temperatures, and decreased Si/Al ratio, resulting in less ordered structures. The positions of the water molecules in the straight and sinusoidal channels for the ZSM-5 samples were mainly determined by the location of the charge compensating cation(s) in the structure, as was shown by the concentration profiles.