title: Molecular-Level Understanding of Structural Changes of Organic Crystals Induced by Macroscopic Mechanical Stimulation.
abstract: Structural changes to molecular crystals upon mechanical stimulation have attracted attention for sensing, recording, and microactuation. Comprehensive structure information is required to understand relationships between the mechanical force applied, the crystal structure, and the bulk property changes in order to develop general design concepts for mechanoresponsive compounds. Unfortunately, mechanical stimulation of organic crystals typically deteriorates their integrity, preventing detailed structure analyses by single-crystal X-ray diffraction (XRD) methods. However, in the past three years, several interesting studies have been reported in which molecular crystals retain their integrity even after a mechanically induced crystalline structure change. These materials have allowed us to investigate how macroscopic mechanical forces affect the microscopic structures of molecular crystals by single-crystal XRD analyses. This Minireview summarizes current knowledge of mechanically induced structure changes in molecular crystals, which will facilitate research in this field.
authors.affiliation: Division of Applied Chemistry and Frontier Chemistry Center, Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Kita 13 Nishi 8 Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido, 060-8628, Japan.
authors.forename: Tomohiro
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Seki
authors.affiliation: Division of Applied Chemistry and Frontier Chemistry Center, Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Kita 13 Nishi 8 Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido, 060-8628, Japan. hajito@eng.hokudai.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Hajime
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3852-6721
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ito
keywords: X-ray diffraction; mechanical stimulation; phase transition; single-crystal-to-single-crystal transformation; stimuli-responsive materials