Unimolecular electron transfer

An expression for the current across a molecular junction is developed by analogy with the description of unimolecular solution phase electron transfer. The conduction is written 1201... 

Experiments in which radical scavengers are added indicate that a chain reaction is involved, because the reaction is greatly retarded in the presence of the scavengers. The mechanism shown below indicates that one of the steps in the chain process is an electron transfer and that none of the steps involves atom abstraction. The elimination of nitrite occurs as a unimolecular decomposition of the radical anion intermediate, and the SrnI mechanistic designation would apply. 

Most interest focuses on very fast reactions. This includes systems whose mean reaction times range from roughly 1 minute to 10 14 second. Reactions that involve bond making or breaking are not likely to occur in less than 10 13 second, since this is the scale of molecular vibrations. Some unimolecular electron transfer events may, however, occur more rapidly. 

New synthetic transformations are highly dependent on the dynamics of the contact ion pair, as well as reactivity of the individual radical ions. For example, the electron-transfer paradigm is most efficient with those organic donors yielding highly unstable cation radicals that undergo rapid unimolecular reactions. Thus, the hexamethyl(Dewar)benzene cation radical that is generated either via CT activation of the [D, A] complex with tropylium cation,74... 

Similarly, the reaction of photoexcited 9,10-dicyanoanthracene (DCA) with a benzylstannane yields the contact ion pair in which the cation radical undergoes rapid mesolytic cleavage of the C—Sn bond to afford benzyl radical and tributyltin cation (which then adds to DCA- )77 (Scheme 14). When such unimolecular processes are faster than the energy-wasting back electron transfer (/cbet) within the contact ion pair, the D/A reactions occur rapidly despite unfavorable driving forces for electron transfer. 

In a similar vein, various electron acceptors yielding anion radicals that undergo rapid unimolecular decomposition also facilitate the efficacy of Scheme 1 by effectively obviating the back-electron transfer. For example, the nitration of enol silyl ether with tetranitromethane (TNM) occurs rapidly (despite an unfavorable redox equilibrium)78 owing to the fast mesolytic fragmentation of the TNM anion radical79 (Scheme 15). 

Fig. 16 Eleven unimolecular rectifiers studied at the University of Alabama as monolayers between Au electrodes (except for 36d and 36e see text). The arrows indicate the experimentally observed direction favored electron transfer however the direction is reversed for 36d and 36e...

The potential influence of the dendrylation on the functional core unit includes sometimes a drastically increased molecule size as well as a steric shielding (encapsulation) and a micro-environment different and isolated from its external surroundings, eg., unimolecular micellar structures, electron-rich shells, solubilization. It is even possible to activate the core unit by both energy and electron transfer processes. In the following subsections, these design possibilities will be dealt with in more detail. 

The thermal and photochemical activations of EDA complexes by electron transfer are both enhanced when the radical ions D+- or A--(either paired or free) undergo a facile first-order (unimolecular) transformation such as fragmentation, rearrangement, bond-formation, etc., which pulls the redox equilibrium and thus renders the competition from the energy-wasting back electron transfer less effective (compare Scheme 5). Critical to the quantitative evaluation of the reaction dynamics is the understanding that the typical [D+% A--] intermediates, as described in... 

In heterogeneous photoredox systems also a surface complex may act as the chromophore. This means that in this case not a bimolecular but a unimolecular photoredox reaction takes place, since electron transfer occurs within the lightabsorbing species, i.e. through a ligand-to-metal charge-transfer transition within the surface complex. This has been suggested for instance for the photochemical reductive dissolution of iron(III)(hydr)oxides (Waite and Morel, 1984 Siffert and Sulzberger, 1991). For continuous irradiation the quantum yield is then ... 

By the late 1960s the development of mode locking (Chapter 1) allowed the study of picosecond laser techniques. Excited-state processes carried out in the picosecond domain allow such processes as intersystem crossing, energy transfer, electron transfer and many pho-toinduced unimolecular reactions to be investigated. 

When this probability is equal to 1 (uniform concentration), the reaction is of pseudo-first order. This is the case, for example, in photoinduced proton transfer in aqueous solutions from an excited acid M (=AH ) (see Section 4.5) M is always within the encounter distance with a water molecule acting as a proton acceptor, and thus proton transfer occurs effectively according to a unimolecular process. This is also the case of photoinduced electron transfer in aniline or its derivatives as solvents an excited acceptor is always in the vicinity of an aniline molecule as an electron donor. In both cases, the excited-state reaction occurs under non-diffusive conditions and is of pseudo-first order. 

A number of publications in recent years have demonstrated an active interest in the theoretical aspects of electron transfer (ET) processes in biological systems (1.-9). This interest was stimulated by the extensive experimental information regarding the temperature dependence of ET rates measured over a broad range of temperatures (10-16). The unimolecular rate of cyto-chrome-c oxidation in Chromatium (10-12), for example, exhibits the Arrhenius type dependence and changes by three orders of... 

A large number of radical reactions proceed by redox mechanisms. These all require electron transfer (ET), often termed single electron transfer (SET), between two species and electrochemical methods are very useful to determine details of the reactions (see Chapter 6). We shall consider two examples here - reduction with samarium di-iodide (Sml2) and SRN1 (substitution, radical-nucleophilic, unimolecular) reactions. The SET steps can proceed by inner-sphere or outer-sphere mechanisms as defined in Marcus theory [19,20]. 

The formation of a coordinated reduced nitrobenzoato ligand radical (or, in spectroscopic terms, a MLCT excited state) has been found in the reaction of e-q with pentaaminocobalt(III) complexes containing a mono- or di-nitrobenzoato ligand272. Such a coordinated radical disappears via unimolecular kinetics, which represents ligand-to-metal intramolecular electron transfer with formation of Co2+... 

It should be noted that the CS lifetime is temperature independent, since the CR process is at the Marcus top region in Fig. 13.11b [50], However, such an extremely long CS lifetime could only be determined in frozen media, since in condensed media bimolecular back electron transfer between two Fc+-ZnP-H2P-C60 is much faster than the unimolecular CR process [50],... 

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