Photochemical Reaction Principles

Since excited states are so different electronically from ground states, it is not surprising that they have very dissimilar chemistry. The atypical molecular orbital interactions available to the highest occupied orbitals of excited singlets and triplets allow many reaction pathways that are unfavorable in the ground state to proceed readily. In fact, some reactions that are virtually impossible to carry out in the dark occur readily in the excited state. 

It should be realized that a photochemically induced reaction may have a multi-step mechanism in which, perhaps, only one step may involve light absorption. For example, an excited molecule may transfer an electron to some acceptor molecule in its ground state to produce two odd-electron species. Both these free radicals may then take part in subsequent dark reactions. Although it is often stated that photochemistry is relatively insensitive to temperature, this is strictly only correct for the initial, light absorbing step and the rapid internal rearrangements of the excited state. Subsequent processes may be very susceptible to temperature effects. 

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The photochemical reactions of organic compounds attracted great interest in the 1960s. As a result, many useful and fascinating reactions were uncovered, and photochemistry is now an important synthetic tool in organic chemistry. A firm basis for mechanistic description of many photochemical reactions has been developed. Some of the more general types of photochemical reactions will be discussed in this chapter. In Section 13.2, the relationship of photochemical reactions to the principles of orbital symmetry will be considered. In later sections, characteristic photochemical reactions of alkenes, dienes, carbonyl compounds, and aromatic rings will be introduced. 

Abnormally high quantum yields may occur in photochemical reactions. Einstein s law of photochemical equivalence is the principle that light is absorbed by molecules in discrete amounts as an individual molecular process (i.e., one molecule absorbs one photon at a time). From optical measurements it is possible to determine quantitatively the number of photons absorbed in the course of a reaction and, from analyses of the product mixture, it is possible to determine the number of molecules that have reacted. The quantum yield is defined as the ratio of the number of molecules reacting to the number of photons absorbed. If this quantity exceeds unity, it provides unambiguous evidence for the existence of secondary processes and thus indicates the presence of unstable intermediates. 

How can these photochemical and electrochemical data be reconciled With the benzylic molecules under discussion, electron transfer may involve the n or the cr orbital, giving rise to stepwise and concerted mechanisms, respectively. This is a typical case where the mechanism is a function of the driving force of the reaction, as evoked earlier. Since the photochemical reactions are strongly down-hill whereas the electrochemical reaction is slightly up-hill at low scan rate, the mechanism may change from stepwise in the first case to concerted in the second. However, regardless of the validity of this interpretation, it is important to address a more fundamental question, namely, whether it is true, from first principles, that a purely dissociative photoinduced electron transfer is necessarily endowed with a unity quantum yield and, more generally, to establish what are the expressions of the quantum yields for concerted and stepwise reactions. 

The process by which a stereochemically inactive center is converted to a specific stereoisomeric form. In most cases, the reacting center is prochiral. Such processes can occur with reactions involving an optically active reagent, solvent, or catalyst (eg., an enzyme). The reaction produced by such a process is referred to as an enantioselective reaction. In principle, use of circularly polarized light in photochemical reactions of achiral reactants might also exhibit asymmetric induction. However, reported enantioselectivities in these cases have been very small. 

Although, in principle, it is possible for some fraction of the events to follow the Odd surface beyond this second intersection and to thus lead to JOdd product molecules that might fluoresce, quenching is known to be rapid in most polyatomic molecules as a result, reactions which are chemiluminescent are rare. An appropriate introduction to the use of OCD s, CCD s, and SCD s as well as the radiationless processes that can occur in thermal and photochemical reactions is given in the text Energetic Principles of Chemical Reactions, J. Simons, Jones and Bartlett, Boston (1983). 

Photodiodes utilize principally the photophysical process of semiconductors. The most typical juctions to attain photoinduced charge separation are shown in Fig. 27 a c. If a photoexcited compound (P) is arranged with donor and/or acceptor on an electrode as shown in Fig. 25 (d), it must work as a kind of photodiode based on new principle of photochemical reaction. A polymer film must be most promising to construct such photoconversion element. 

In the course of a reaction the nuclei and electrons assume positions that at each point correspond to the lowest free energies possible. If the reaction is reversible, these positions must be the same in the reverse process, too. This means that the forward and reverse reactions (run under the same conditions) must proceed by the same mechanism. This is called the principle of microscopic reversibility. For example, if in a reaction A — B there is an intermediate C, then C must also be an intermediate in the reaction B — A, This is a useful principle since it enables us to know the mechanism of reactions in which the equilibrium lies far over to one side. Reversible photochemical reactions are an exception, since a molecule that has been excited photochemically does not have to lose its energy in the same way (Chapter 7). 

In addition to these differences between excited-state and ground-state properties that influence chemical behaviour, there are some practical considerations that give photochemistry its distinctive features. In a thermal reaction, heat energy is normally supplied in an indiscriminate way to all the species in the reaction mixture— substrates, solvent and products—and this makes it difficult, for example, to prepare heat-sensitive compounds. In a photochemical reaction light can. in principle, be supplied selectively to just one... 

The irradiation of benzenes with alkenes provides a fascinating array of photochemical reactions, not least because it converts the aromatic substrates into polycyclic, non-aromatic products. In principle, benzene can undergo reaction across the 1,2-(ortho). 1,3-(meta), or 1,4-(para) positions the 1,3-cycloaddition is structurally the most complex, but it is the predominant mode of reaction for many of the simplest benzene/alkene systems. The products are tricyclic compounds with a fusion of two five-membered rings and one three-membered ring, and an example is the reaction of benzene with vinyl acetate (3.411. For monosubstituted benzenes there can be a high... 

In a thermal reaction R—>TS—>P, as shown in Figure 4.4, the transition state TS is reached through thermal activation, so that the general observation is that the rates of thermal reactions increase with temperature. The same is in fact true of many photochemical reactions when they are essentially adiabatic, for the primary photochemical process is then a thermally activated reaction of the excited reactant R. A non-adiabatic reaction such as R - (TS) —> P is in principle temperature independent and can be considered as a type of non-radiative transition from a state R to a state P of lower energy, for example in some reactions of isomerization (see section 4.4.2). 

In principle any photochemical reaction of known quantum yield can be used as an actinometer, the choice depending on the irradiation wavelength(s). It is convenient to measure the concentration of the actinometer by absorption spectrophotometry, and in many cases the same technique can be used to determine the concentration of the sample itself. 

An extraordinary variety of reactions of organic compounds are known to occur under the influence of visible and ultraviolet light. Some of these, such as the photochemical halogenation of alkanes and photosynthesis in green plants, already have been discussed (see Sections 4-4D and 20-9). It is notour purpose here to review organic photochemistry in detail — rather, we shall mention a few types of important photochemical reactions and show how these can be explained by the principles discussed in the preceding section. 

FMO calculations using PM3-C1 were used to investigate the regioselectivities obtained by the photochemical reactions between 2-pyridone and pcnta-2,4-dienoate.46 The hard and soft acid-base principle has been successfully used to predict product formation in Patemo-Buchi reactions.47 The 2 + 2-photo-cycloaddition of homobenz-valene with methyl phenylglyoxylate, benzyl, benzophenone, and 1,4-benzoquinone produced the corresponding Patemo-Buchi products.48 The photo-cycloaddition of acrylonitrile to 5-substituted adamantan-2-ones produces anti- and svn-oxetanes in similar ratios irrespective of the nature of the 5-substituent49... 

The ortho cycloaddition is thermally forbidden in a suprafacial-suprafacial manner and the photochemical reaction is forbidden with S benzene and ground-state alkene. On the basis of these considerations, it could be understood that the ortho addition had only been observed with systems where the alkene is the lowest excited singlet species (as with maleimides [37,74,75] or where either the alkene or the arene has marked acceptor properties (the only examples known at that time were benzene-acrylonitrile [127] and benzonitrile + a mono-olefin [1,73], Benzene-acrylonitrile and benzonitrile-olefin systems do not display charge-transfer absorption, but charge transfer could well follow excitation. Bryce-Smith further stated that irradiation of benzene in the presence of simple mono-olefins normally provides B2u (Si) benzene as the lowest excited singlet species, which leads to meta rather than ortho addition, but the latter process might, in principle, be able to occur under conditions where a Biu (S2) state of benzene is populated. 

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