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Pyrene (Photo-neat)

By moleculeoftheday on August 11, 2008.

Pyrene is a simple, four-fused benzene PAH:

i-5c3e2dee71a25c196dcbfe0a74f8e747-pyrene.png

What makes it neat is how it interacts with light. In particular, it's got some unusually sharp UV bands that are sensitive to solvent polarity. Additionally, the excited state dimer exhibits some especially unique photochemistry of its own, providing a way to sense whether you've got two stacked pyrenes together.

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Pyrene! Pyrene is fabulous. I hate to split hairs here, but we're talking about my pseudonym namesake here: the excimer you speak of is an excited-state dimer. A pyrene ground-state dimer doesn't exist, but high concentrations lead to nondiscrete aggregation, leading to excimers upon absorption of light.

But you already knew that. Yay for pyrene! So easy even biologists can use it

Imagine pre-assembling stacked pyrenes along a polyene backbone. Add a long tail to each pyrene for solubility and spontaneous liquid crystallization. Shine a light - ambient temp exciton superconductor? Low dispersivity polymer synthesis via olefin metathesis/ethylene extrusion is straighforward.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/pyrene1.png
(H atoms and pi-bonds omitted for clarity)