Diarylethene materials for photon-mode optical storage

Photon-mode recording of photochromic materials is regarded as a promising storage system, which has various advantages over the traditional heat-mode recording in terms of its data capacity and data-recording rate. Diarylethenes show good thermal stability and remarkable fatigue resistance, and these properties are indispensable for the applications to optical storage materials. In present work, several diarylethene compounds were synthesized, and a series of optical storage tests were carried out on the sample discs with diarylethenes as the recording materials. The recording based on these photochromic materials was photon-type,and the recorded regions appeared as faded dots. 780, 650 and 532 nm lasers were used for writing on the corresponding discs, and the recorded information were readout by the same lasers respectively. A two-wavelength optical storage was realized on a mixed diarylethene recording layer by two laser beams of 532 nm and 650 nm synchronously. A higher data capacity can thus be expected to reach by using a multi-wavelength optical storage like that. Although the diarylethenes satisfy the minimum demands of optical storage systems, these molecules have one unsolved drawback: the lack of a non-destructive capability. In this work, Electric-locked properties were investigated in a BT3FP-OH thin film; the electric trigger could prevent the photochromic reactions, which provided a practicable non-destructive readout method. Three kinds of diarylethene derivatives linked by solvatochromic dye units wer fabricated; the theoretical investigation showed that reading at the wavelength of about 650-750 nm would destroy the recorded information no longer. Thus a non-destructive method could be constructed on these diarylethene molecules.