ETH researchers have developed a modular system for the simple and inexpensive production of security inks. It is based on polymers and could also be used in solar power plants and screens in the .
Entire colour palette of inexpensive fluorescent dyes
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Chain length determines molecular colour
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Glowing, colour-changing polymer
These polymers, seen here under UV light, are composed of the exact same components. The only difference is their chain length. Credit: Suiying Ye / ETH Zurich
An international team of chemists, including some Australians, have developed a type of polymer that can glow in a broad range of colours.
Fluorescent molecules are useful for lighting, solar cell research, medical imaging, and biological lab tests like PCR tests, among other things. It can be difficult to achieve precise colours in fluorescent dyes, and manufacturers often have to mix very different compounds together to get to certain colours.
But a new paper published in
Potential uses include biomedicine, security printing, and solar energy.
Around the world, a huge amount of research and development work is underway on carbon-containing, or organic, molecules that emit colored light after appropriate excitation. The display industry and the development of biomedical imaging techniques drives this work.
While precise color tuning in organic fluorescent dyes has typically involved mixing different molecules, ETH Zurich researchers have now developed an approach that can generate a broad palette of colors with chemical adjustments within the molecules themselves.
Yinyin Bao, a group leader in the group of professor Jean-Christophe Leroux, and his team of scientists turned to fluorescent organic polymers. You can think of these polymers as moving chains of varying lengths.