Steady-state X-ray photodiffraction

Fig. 1 Schematic of a setup for in situ steady-state X-ray photodiffraction using continuous wave and pulsed excitation sources...

The examples of ex situ steady-state X-ray photodiffraction utihzed to follow the photodimerizations of olefin bonds in a single-crystal-to-single-crystal (or nearly so) manner are ubiquitous in the chemical literature. The interest of sohd-state chemists in this reaction dates back to the work of Cohen and Schmidt [30, 31], and it has become much of a guinea pig in organic solid-state photochemistry. In 1993, Enkelmann and collaborators published two seminal papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society [32] and in Angewandte Chemie [33], where they presented a series of structures of a-tra s-cinnamic acid crystals reacted to various extents. These reports laid the way for a plethora of later studies on the olefin photodimerization reaction. The convenience of the high conversion and the simple mechanism, combined with the relatively small structural perturbation that it requires, has turned this reaction into a very useful tool to probe intermolecular... 

Photoinduced spin-related phenomena are a particularly important field of the solid-state photophysics, because fast spin switching is a prospective basis for applications in the field of spintronics. An illustrative example is the production of the metastable state of the iron propyltetrazole (ptz) complex [Fe(ptz)6](BF4)2 by laser light-induced excited spin-state trapping (LIESST) and the determination of the resulting structure by steady-state X-ray photodiffraction [68]. In another example, steady-state X-ray photodiffraction at cryogenic temperatures was successfully utilized to study photoinduced phase transition due to spin crossover in the tris(a-picolylamine)iron(II) complex [69]. The phase transition is accompanied by... 

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