Photochemionic Devices

In the last few years there has been a great interest in developing electronics at a molecular level (molecular electronics), e.g. to construct miniaturized electric circuits that would be much smaller than the corresponding micron-scale digital logic circuits fabricated on conventional solid-state semiconductor chips. An alternative way towards information processing at the molecular level is combination of photonics and chemionics. Suitably designed supramolecular species are indeed capable of combining light and chemical inputs to perform functions that mimic those of macroscopic devices. This paper describes the working principles of molecular-level photochemionic devices for (i) chemical switching of photonic input/output signals, (ii) chemical tuning of photonic input/output signals, (iii) chemical and photonic switching of optical properties, and (iv) light powered, chemical input(s), optical output logic gates.