Molecular Scissors

Anant Babu Marahatta (ananta037@gmail.com)
Tohoku Univ.
Japan

You might wonder to know that molecules work like a scissors in the presence of UV radiation. Such molecules are called “molecular scissors”. Here is an example of it in which an azobenzene moiety acts as a handle, a ferrocene unit acts as a pivot point and two phenyl groups act as the blades.

The conformational changes induced by cis-trans isomerization of the azobenzene switch, due to alternating irradiation with UV and visible light, are translated into a rotational movement around the metal center of the ferrocene unit.

Source: a text book about “Controlled Rotary Motion at the Molecular Level”