Posted on 04/25/2009 3:15:34 PM PDT by decimon
>
For more than a decade, chemical engineer Jiro Abe and colleagues at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan have been studying the light-sensitive properties of photochromic materials, particularly those derived from a compound called hexaarylbiimidazole (HABI). In its natural state, HABI is colorless, but when ultraviolet light breaks one of the bonds in the molecule, it produces a version that is dark blue. The problem has been that the transformation takes tens of seconds or longer, so the only commercial application has been sunglasses that slowly darken.
When Abe's team began analyzing HABI's chemical structure through simulations and laboratory experiments, they found that by adding naphthalene to the compound, they could accelerate the color change to about 180 milliseconds. Adding a compound called cyclophane instead of naphthalene improved the clear-to-blue conversion even more--to about 30 milliseconds. Better still, Abe and colleagues report in the current issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the cyclophane version of HABI reverts just as rapidly to its colorless state when the UV light source is turned off. And the compound is so stable that the reactions can be repeated thousands of times.
>
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenow.sciencemag.org ...
I’ve had Transition lenses for what...a decade now?!
The breakthrough here is greatly increasing the speed of the transition.
I once dated an aarylbiimidazole. She put a hex on me too.
Do they transit in 30 milliseconds?
Ping me and the other greedy capitalists when commercial production has been successful.
Will they add this to contact lenses in the future? If so, then I won’t bother with LASIK.
this gets an 8.5 on my “cool-as-heck-o-meter”.
How quickly did she go from dark blue to clear?
Quite some time. She had a lot of engrams.
I didn't think of that. It would help people with prescription lenses, wouldn't it.
If it doesn’t it is harmful as a sunglasses material.
True. It reacts to UV light but no mention of blocking it.
Yes, especially those who are finicky about sunglasses, like myself. I just want a pair that are the same size and shape as my regular glasses, but having a small head makes that a bit difficult.
I don't walk that fast either, so who cares
Whether the material blocks UV doesn’t matter- other UV blockers could be added to lenses that use this.
If you put a UV blocker on it, wouldn’t that stop it from working?
Cool. I wouldn't want to go blind in the three seconds before I became a crispy critter.
Hey, if you’re gonna get fried you might as well see the most beautiful thing in your life a second before...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.