Optical Communication among Oscillatory Reactions and Photo‐Excitable Systems: UV and Visible Radiation Can Synchronize Artificial Neuron Models

Neuromorphic engineering promises to have a revolutionary impact in our societies. A strategy to develop artificial neurons (ANs) is to use oscillatory and excitable chemical systems. Herein, we use UV and visible radiation as both excitatory and inhibitory signals for the communication among oscillatory reactions, such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky and the chemiluminescent Orban transformations, and photo‐excitable photochromic and fluorescent species. We present the experimental results and the simulations regarding pairs of ANs communicating by either one or two optical signals, and triads of ANs arranged in both feed‐forward and recurrent networks. We find that the ANs, powered chemically and/or by the energy of electromagnetic radiation, can give rise to the emergent properties of in‐phase, out‐of‐phase, anti‐phase synchronizations and phase‐locking, dynamically mimicking the communication among real neurons.     

Reversible Photothermal Isomerization of Carborane‐Fused Azaborole to Borirane: Synthesis and Reactivity of Carbene‐Stabilized Carborane‐Fused Borirane

A fully reversible photothermal isomerization between carborane‐fused trigonal‐planar azaborole (dark‐purple) and tetrahedral borirane (pale‐yellow) has been observed, leading to the isolation and structural characterization of the first example of carborane‐fused borirane. DFT calculations indicate that the azaborole is thermodynamically more stable than the borirane by 11.2 kcal mol⁻¹, and the energy barrier for the thermal conversion from azaborole to borirane is 35.5 kcal mol⁻¹. The reactivity studies show that the B−C(cage) bond in borirane can be broken in the reaction with CuCl, HCl, or elemental sulfur.