Abstract:

"Physical chemistry experiments" is one of the most important undergraduate chemistry experiment courses in many universities. Comprehensive as they are, these courses suffer from a drawback of lacking an experiment that connects the knowledge between different chapters and to the frontier research of the chemical society. Inspired by a published work of Prof. Dongsheng Guo's group concerning the detection and imaging of cholinesterase using a sequentially activated diacetylene probe, we designed a physical chemistry experiment of "The photopolymerization, thermochromism and application of diacetylene vesicle". We focused on the preparation of diacetylene vesicle, the photopolymerization of diacetylene, the thermochromism of polydiacetylene, and further explored the experiment's potential application on the anti-forgery technology. We hope that by performing this experiment, students can have deeper understanding of different fields of physical chemistry, such as colloid, photochemistry, thermodynamics, dynamics etc., and can know more about current chemistry research on self-assembly, photopolymerization, chromogenic materials, anti-forgery, etc.

Key words: Self-assembled nanomaterials, Diacetylene vesicle, Photopolymerization, Thermochromism, Anti-forgery technology