SIG lecture – Engineering Metal-Organic Co-Crystals for Reversible Photochemical Reactivity

During his sabbatical, Charley Liberko had the opportunity to do research in the fields of crystal engineering and organic photochemistry. Using silver ions as templates, he was able to create highly ordered co-crystals of cyanovinylpyridine derivatives where the alkene functional groups were perfectly aligned for a stereospecific 2+2 photo cycloaddition reaction. By altering the substituent groups on the alkene, we are in the process of being able to understand the conditions necessary to obtain a reversible solid state photoreaction. In addition to their utility in organic synthesis, these new materials have potential applications in optical data storage devices. Come and learn more about this groundbreaking research May 19th.