Structural dynamics of photoinduced molecular switching in the solid state

Fast and ultra-fast time-resolved diffraction is a fantastic tool for directly observing the structural dynamics of a material rearrangement during the transformation induced by an ultra-short laser pulse. The paper illustrates this ability using the dynamics of photoinduced molecular switching in the solid state probed by 100 ps X-ray diffraction. This structural information is crucial for establishing the physical foundations of how to direct macroscopic photoswitching in materials. A key feature is that dynamics follow a complex pathway from molecular to material scales through a sequence of processes. Not only is the pathway indirect, the nature of the dynamical processes along the pathway depends on the timescale. This dictates which types of degrees of freedom are involved in the subsequent dynamics or kinetics and which are frozen or statistically averaged. We present a recent investigation of the structural dynamics in multifunctional spin-crossover materials, which are prototypes of molecular bistability in the solid state. The time-resolved X-ray diffraction results show that the dynamics span from subpicosecond molecular photoswitching followed by volume expansion (on a nanosecond timescale) and additional thermoswitching (on a microsecond timescale).