TECHNICOLOR DREAM COLUMN

Gianluigi Albano stared for a long time at this colorful silica column that allowed him to purify a chemical compound he’d made. Because Albano, a postdoc in Gianluca Maria Farinola’s lab at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, works with molecules that interact with light, his starting material, product, and many of the by-products that resulted from his reaction left behind these fluorescent bands in the silica, photographed here under ultraviolet light. In this reaction, Albano was adding bromide atoms to a perylene diimide dye. His ultimate goal is replace those bromide sites with various chiral groups and see how the new chiral dyes interact with circularly polarized light.