Photoinduced radical reactions transformation

Electronically excited phthalimides can act as good electron acceptors and carboxylic acids are documented to serve as electron donors in photoinduced SET reactions. It is likely then, that in the excited state, an electron transfer process between the phthalimide system and the carboxylic acid would occur, leading to charge-separated diradical 6. Proton transfer from the carboxylic acid function (iT" is an electrofugal group) would form a carboxy radical 7, which could undergo rapid decarboxylation to azomethyne ylide 8. This reactive species is transformed into the final decarboxylated product 3 by intramolecular proton transfer (Scheme 16.4). 

The carbon-carbon bond formation via photoinduced electron transfer has recently attracted considerable attention from both synthetic and mechanistic viewpoints [240-243]. In order to achieve efficient C-C bond formation via photoinduced electron transfer, the choice of an appropriate electron donor is essential. Most importantly, the donor should be sufficiently strong to attain efficient photoinduced electron transfer. Furthermore, the bond cleavage in the donor radical cation produced in the photoinduced electron transfer should occur rapidly in competition with the fast back electron transfer. Organosilanes that have been frequently used as key reagents for many synthetically important transformations [244-247] have been reported to act as good electron donors in photoinduced electron-transfer reactions [248, 249]. The one-electron oxidation potentials of ketene silyl acetals (e.g., E°o relative to the SCE = 0.90 V for Me2C=C(OMe)OSiMe3) [248] are sufficiently low to render the efficient photoinduced electron transfer to Ceo [22], which, after the addition of ketene silyl acetals, yields the fullerene with an ester functionality (Eq. 15) [250, 251]. 

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