Dyes in zeolites at high pressure

What is it about?

Dyes included in porous matrices are interesting materials for technological applications. For example, they can be used in solar cells, drug delivery, diagnostics, and optical devices. Studying their behaviour at high pressure would be important to extend their application range beyond normal conditions, but this has never been done, so far. Here, we choose a dye, we put it inside a zeolite - a porous container with channels of molecular size - and see how the material reacts to extreme compression by using both experiments and computer simulations.

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Why is it important?

Apparently, our main result seems quite boring: we push the resistance of the material to its limit, and nothing happens. At high pressure, the arrangement of the dyes inside the pores is preserved, and the interactions governing the stability of the material become stronger. We are very happy about this, because it means that our material can withstand huge stresses without undergoing deformations and losing functionality.

Perspectives

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The impressive resilience of our dye-zeolite material to high pressure is a very promising result. It may open the way to the fabrication of optical devices able to work under extreme mechanical stress. More personally, doing this work was a great pleasure also because I have long standing collaborations with the co-authors: they are friends rather than colleagues, so it is easier to work synergically - which is key for the success of any project.

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