A collaboration of researchers from Kumamoto,Yamaguchi, and Osaka Universities in Japan have discovered a new method of drastically changing the color and fluorescence of a specific compound using only oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2) gases. The fully reversible reaction is environmentally friendly since it produces only water as a byproduct. Rather than using electrical or photo energy, and the discovery uses energy from the gases themselves,which is expected to become a future trend, to switch the color and fluorescence properties. The technique could be used as a detection sensor for hydrogen or oxygen gases as well as for property controls of biological semiconductors and biological light emitting diodes (OLEDs).
Source: phys.org