Photo-Switchable Boronic Acid Derived Salicylidenehydrazone Enabled by Photochromic Spirooxazine and Fulgide Moieties: Multiple Responses of Optical Absorption, Fluorescence Emission, and Quadratic Nonlinear Optics

摘要： A novel protocol of the boronic acid derived salicylidenehydrazone (BASHY) core being sandwiched by photochromic spirooxazine and fulgide moieties was proposed here to design multistate fluorescent photoswitches with variable nonlinear optical (NLO) responses. Systematic investigations on their optical absorption, fluorescence emission, and static first hyperpolarizabilities (β) were performed using density functional theory (DFT). It was found that the BASHY-based sandwiched series exhibited significant differences of absorption and emission properties between three photoisomers, which were essentially ascribed to the massive changes of corresponding electron transition characteristics quantified by hole–electron descriptors and visualized by electron density difference (EDD) plots. However, the isomerization of fulgide parts in the merocyanine (MC) form of spirooxazine failed to greatly shift maximum absorption/emission wavelengths, due to their high similarity of intrinsic transition features. Furthermore, large β contrasts between three photoisomers were observed, which resulted from significant variations of contributions of spirooxazine and/or fulgide moieties to the total β upon photoisomerization according to β densities. Although the fulgide moiety contributes negatively and positively to spirooxazine (SO) isomers when fulgide switches from close (C-) to open (E-) forms, respectively, their dominant βxxx values with opposite signs are still similar in magnitude, leading to quite close quadratic NLO responses. Therefore, the captivating ternary photoswitches with multiple responses of absorption, emission, and NLO were elaborately built in this context, promising to be applied as multifunctional optical materials in various scientific and technological fields.