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Entrapment of Organic Molecules GENERAL ASPECTS OF ENCAPSULATION OF ORGANIC MOLECULES IN SOL–GEL GLASSES The sol–gel process is a chemical synthesis technique for preparing inorganic oxides at low temperature such as ambient temperature. This mild condition enables one to form organic molecule-doped inorganic materials that cannot be obtained by the conventional high temperature processes. The basic idea is simple, but the impact is very vast. Therefore, doping glasses with organic molecules has become one of the most important fields of the sol–gel process (Avnir, 1992, 1995). The process is as follows: adding the desired dopant to the starting sol–gel solutions, gelation, and drying. In general, organic dopant molecules are dissolved in methanol, ethanol or water. The dopants are introduced into the sol–gel systems by adding solutions. The first example was rhodamine 6G in tetramethoxysilane (TMOS)-derived silica (Avnir, 1984). Since then encapsulation of organic molecules in sol–gel glasses has extended in various fields such as photonic materials (Zink, 1991; Reisfeld, 1996), sensors (Wolbeis, 1996), organic/inorganic hybrids (Coltrain, 1996), template synthesis of organized matter (Mann, 1997), biochemical–inorganic composites (Avnir, 1994; Premkumar, 2002) and so on. Some of the properties and advantages of the doped sol–gel glasses were summarized as follows (Avnir, 1992): The glasses are stable thermally, chemically and photochemically, especially when compared to plastics matrices. The encapsulated molecules are well protected much better than in plastics. The glasses are transparent well into the UV, allowing a whole array of photochemical, photophysical and optical applications. The trapped molecules are either non-leachable, or, in some cases, leachable over a very long time period. A sub-population of the non-leachable molecules is trapped close enough to the pore-surface, to be able to interact with substrate molecules contained in the pore-surface. Th