From these concepts it can be seen that radiation with a shorter wavelength has a higher energy, and that radiation with a longer wavelength has lower energy. Since light is a form of energy, absorption of light by matter causes an increase in the energy content of the molecules or atoms. The wavelength of light absorbed is that which has energy equal to that required to move an electron from a lower energy level to a higher energy level. There were a number of conjugated aromatics studied with this instrumentation, but two compounds had significant results. These compounds were studied because they have potential applications as nonlinear optical materials and photoimaging dyes and can also be introduced into bilayer vesicles.
Vesicles are a good model for biomembrane studies and can be used as drug delivery vehicles.
The long term goal of this research is to study the interactions between vesicles and these compounds. The short term goal was to investigate the polarity effect of the solvent on the photophysical properties of these compounds. This infers that the energy gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital for compound D in polar solvents was greater than the energy gap in nonpolar solvents. The energy gap for compound E in polar solvents was less than the energy gap for compound E in nonpolar solvents. There are possibilities as to why there was a reverse trend for these two compounds.