Photoinduced mechanical motion of photochromic crystalline materials

Abstract

Photochromic compounds undergo a photochemically reversible transformation reaction between two isomers. Such molecules in organic crystals, which are regularly oriented and fixed in the crystal lattice, may be potentially useful for optoelectronic devices, such as optical memory, photoswitchable color filter, photoswitchable polarizer, photomechanical actuator, and so on. This chapter has focused on photochromism of the diarylethene crystals and their photomechanical phenomena, such as crystal bending and twisting.