New molecules reversibly change with light and heat

A student, a lecturer, and a professor from Osaka Metropolitan University have created new compounds called aza-diarylethenes, where nitrogen replaces carbon in a structure similar to known photoswitching diarylethenes. These new molecules can switch properties both with light (photoswitching) and heat (thermal switching). They showed that these photoswitching molecules can serve as rewritable recording media, allowing information to be written with light or heat and erased with light.