Sensor activity and logic behaviour of PET based dihydroimidazonaphthalimide diester

An ester terminated dihydroimidazonaphthalimide as multi-functional logic device is presented. Due to the optical changes as a function of pH this simple molecule is able to act as a molecular pH metre, a digital comparator and a half-adder. It was demonstrated that the dihydroimidazonaphthalimide comparator could be used as a fundamental element of an optical device for control of pH windows. Also, the ability of the device to detect metal ions in DMF and in water/DMF (3:1, v/v) at different pHs has been evaluated by monitoring the changes of its fluorescence intensity. Among the tested metal ions (Cd(2+), Co(2+), Cu(2+), Fe(3+), Ni(2+), Pb(2+), Zn(2+), Bi(3+), Hg(2+) and Ag(+)) only Fe(3+) and Bi(3+) were efficiently detected. In water/DMF (3:1, v/v) XOR and XNOR logic gates are presented using pH and Fe(3+) as chemical inputs based on encoding binary digits of logical conventions.