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Identification of single photoswitchable molecules in nanopores of silica xerogels using powder diffraction

J. Appl. Cryst. (2010). 43, 1040-1045 (doi.org/10.1107/S0021889810028955)

[Host-guest system]

Nanostructured functional materials are often realized by embedding functional molecules in porous host materials. We demonstrate that powder diffraction experiments combined with the Debye approach enable us to extract structural information of isolated molecules in a host: the structural motif (fingerprint) of the molecule, the pore filling factor and the main distances between host and guest material. This opens the way to structural characterization of such amorphous composite or hybrid materials with standard laboratory diffractometers.

A. Cervellino, J. Schefer, L. Keller, T. Woike and D. Schaniel
3 November 2010