Photoredox catalysis
Photoredox catalysis is a branch of photochemistry that uses single-electron transfer. Photoredox catalysts are generally drawn from three classes of materials: transition-metal complexes, organic dyes, and semiconductors. While organic photoredox catalysts were dominant throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, soluble transition-metal complexes are more commonly used today. Photochemistry of transition metal sensitizers Sensitizers absorb light to give redox-active excited states. For many metal-based sensitizers, excitation is realized as a metal-to-ligand charge transfer, whereby an electron moves from the metal (e.g., a d orbital) to an orbital localized on the ligands (e.g. the π* orbital of an aromatic ligand). The initial excited electronic state relaxes to the lowest energy singlet excited state through internal conversion, a process where energy is dissipated as vibrational energy rather than as electromagnetic radiation. This singlet excited state can relax further by two distinct processes: the catalyst may fluoresce, radiating a photon and returning to the singlet ground state, or it can move to the lowest energy triplet excited state (a state where two unpaired electrons have the same spin) by a second non-radiative process termed intersystem crossing. Direct relaxation of the excited triplet to the ground state, termed phosphorescence, requires both emission of a photon