Photolysis mechanism exciplex formation

The quantum yield for the formation of the cycloaddition product has been found to be temperature dependent, increasing by a factor of approximately three as the temperature is lowered from 65 ( = 0.24) to 5°C ( = 0.69). Photolysis of mixtures of the olefin and f/my-stilbene in the presence of sensitizers yielded no cycloaddition product (42) but rather only m-stilbene. This suggests that the cycloadduct is produced via a singlet reaction. This conclusion is supported by the fact that tetramethylethylene quenches fluorescence from the /rans-stilbene singlet. A plot of l/ (42) vs. 1/[TME] (TME = tetramethylethylene) is linear. The slope of this plot yields rate constants for cycloadduct formation which show a negative temperature dependence. To account for this fact, a reversibly formed exciplex leading to (42) was proposed in the following mechanism<82) ... 

Photocycloaddition and photoaddition can be utilized for new carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond formation under mild conditions from synthetic viewpoints. In last three decades, a large number of these photoreactions between electron-donating and electron-accepting molecules have been appeared and discussed in the literature, reviews, and books [1-10]. In these photoreactions, a variety of reactive intermediates such as excimers, exciplexes, triplexes, radical ion pairs, and free-radical ions have been postulated and some of them have been detected as transient species to understand the reaction mechanism. Most of reactive species in solution have been already characterized by laser flash photolysis techniques, but still the prediction for the photochemical process is hard to visualize. In preparative organic photochemistry, the dilemma that the transient species including emission are hardly observed in the reaction system giving high chemical yields remains in most cases [11,12]. 

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