Unimolecular Excited State Reactions

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. 

Some years ago Cornelisse reported that deuteration of alkyl benzenes results in a deuterium isotope effect upon the quantum yield of the meta photocycloaddition reaction with alkenes. In a new report the same group has published an analysis describing how the observed isotope effect upon the reaction quantvun yield can be ascribed to a kinetic deuterium isotope effect on the excited state reaction and distinguished from an effect upon the unimolecular photophysical modes of decay of the excited state. In addition, it is reported that when the quantum yield of meta photocycloaddition of cyclopentene to alkyl benzenes is measured using a mixture of deuterated and non-deuterated benzenes, the quantum yield is arene concentration dependent.The authors argue that this arises from competition between cycloaddition and the formation of mixed excimers between deuterated and non-deuterated alkyl benzenes which dissociate to yield excited deuterated alkyl benzene and ground state non-deuterated alkyl benzene preferentially. 

Table 1 lists the main photochemical reactions of organometallic compounds. Unimolecular excited state processes without net chemical change can also occur as in equations (1) and (2) ... 

A simple aliphatic ketone such as acetone, when promoted to its n,n excited state, undergoes a single unimolecular photochemical reaction in high quantum yield namely a-cleavage giving a methyl and acetyl radical which react further in secondary dark processes. In general, competition... 

The 7T orbital extends over the entire enone system. As a consequence the C —CO bond is strengthened in the excited states and a-cleavage, the important primary photoprocess in nonconjugated ketones, is not observed. The most important unimolecular reaction types are processes which involve... 

The relative ease with which lasers can produce high concentrations of excited states can be important in initiating multi-molecular photochemistry. It is trivial to produce 0.1 M or greater photon "concentration" in a 1 y volume over a 10 ns period of time. Subsequent multimolecular reactions of excited states or labile photofragments are limited principally by the unimolecular lifetimes involved. 

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. 

In this part of the chapter, we will briefly outline the main types of CL reactions which can be functionally classified by the nature of the excitation process that leads to the formation of the electronically excited state of the light-emitting species. Direct chemiluminescence is the term employed for a reaction in which the excited product is formed directly from the unimolecular reaction of a high-energy intermediate that has been formed in prior reaction steps. The simplest example of this type of CL is the unimolecular decomposition of 1,2-dioxetanes, which are isolated HEI. Thermal decomposition of 1,2-dioxetanes leads mainly to the formation of triplet-excited carbonyl compounds. Although singlet-excited carbonyl compounds are produced in much lower yields, their fluorescence emission constitutes the direct chemiluminescence emission observed in these transformations under normal conditions in aerated solutions ... 

The unimolecular decomposition of 1,2-dioxetanes and 1,2-dioxetanones (a-peroxylac-tones) is the simplest and most exhaustively studied example of a thermal reaction that leads to the formation, in this case in a single elementary step, of the electronically excited state of one of the product molecules. The mechanism of this transformation was studied intensively in the 1970s and early 1980s and several hundreds of 1,2-dioxetane derivatives and some 1,2-dioxetanones were synthesized and their activation parameters and CL quantum yields determined. Thermal decomposition of these cyclic peroxides leads mainly to the formation of triplet-excited carbonyl products in up to 30% yields. However, formation of singlet excited products occurs in significantly lower yields (below... 

Of course, in a thermal reaction, molecules of the reactant do not all have the same energy, and so application of RRKM theory to the evaluation of the overall unimolecular rate constant, k m, requires that one specify the distribution of energies. This distribution is usually derived from the Lindemann-Hinshelwood model, in which molecules A become activated to vibrationally and rotationally excited states A by collision with some other molecules in the system, M. In this picture, collisions between M and A are assumed to transfer energy in the other direction, that is, returning A to A ... 

For a photoexcited molecule, the time allowed for a reaction to occur is of the order of the lifetime of the particular excited state, or less when the reaction step must compete with other photophysical processes. The photoreaction can be unimolecular such as photodissociation and photo isomerization or may need another molecule, usually unexcited, of the same or different kind and hence bimolectdar. If the primary processes generate free radicals, they may lead to secondary processes in the dark. 

There can be a difference between the dissociation of polyatomic molecules and delayed ionization in the nature of the initial excitation. In ZEKE spectroscopy the state that is optically accessed (typically via an intermediate resonantly excited state) is a high Rydberg state, that is a state where most of the available energy is electronic excitation. Such a state is typically directly coupled to the continuum and can promptly ionize, unlike the typical preparation process in a unimolecular dissociation where the state initially accessed does not have much of its energy already along the reaction coordinate. It is quite possible however to observe delayed ionization in molecules that have acquired their energy by other means so that the difference, while certainly important is not one of principle. 

Diffusion of molecules in rigid glasses is negligible within the lifetimes of excited molecules, so that the main reactions are unimolecular dissociations and isomerization. These are rather similar to liquid state reactions, but the fragments cannot separate through diffusion and often recombine to restore the reactants. There are exceptions when the photoproducts are in fact more stable than the reactants, as in the case of photoeliminations. 

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