Motion (physics)

Gene

Quantum mechanics

Scale (ratio)

Linguistics

Engineering

Philosophy

Locality

Messenger RNA

Materials science

Bevel gear

Rotation around a fixed axis

Biochemistry

Computer science

Classical mechanics

Rotation (mathematics)

Translation (biology)

Mechanical engineering

Physics

Nanotechnology

Molecular machine

Artificial intelligence

Chemistry

Nanoscopic scale

Nature Chemistry

One of the major challenges for harnessing the true potential of functional nano-machinery is integrating and transmitting motion with great precision. Molecular gearing systems enable the integration of multiple motions in a correlated fashion to translate motions from one locality to another and to change their speed and direction. However, currently no powerful methods exist to implement active driving of gearing motions at the molecular scale. Here we present a light-fuelled molecular gearing system and demonstrate its superiority over passive thermally activated gearing. Translation of a 180° rotation into a 120° rotation is achieved while at the same time the direction of the rotation axis is shifted by 120°. Within such photogearing processes, precise motions at the nanoscale can be changed in direction and decelerated in a manner similar to macroscopic bevel-gear operations in an energy consuming way—a necessary prerequisite to employ gearing as an active component in future mechanical nano-systems.                                                                  In a similar fashion to its macroscopic counterpart, molecular gearing is a correlated motion of intermeshed molecular fragments against one another. Now it has been shown that photogearing can be used to actively fuel molecular gearing motions with light and concomitantly shift the axis of rotation.

Photogearing as a concept for translation of precise motions at the nanoscale