They set about combining their different backgrounds to start tweaking the original molecular compound that created the first butterfly. In the end, they wound up creating several molecules that varied ever so slightly from its brothers and sisters in chemical composition and size.

Huang said with computational tools they were able to discover how to design these new molecules and get them to act precisely the way they wanted. They could create different wavelengths of energy at different times, simply depending on the design of the molecules.

“It’s a matter of fundamental understanding of the structure-property relationships,” Huang said. “With powerful computational tools, we can gain insights on how the molecular properties are determined by the structure and come up with the molecular design rules.”