Photoredox Catalysis

Over the past decades, immeasurable radical reactions, and techniques for producing free radicals have been devised, and the field of radical chemistry has continuously expanded as a result of the accumulation of understanding and increased versatility. Yet, since it believes that radical species are tricky to control and the reactions are difficult to anticipate, radical chemistry has historically been seen as inferior to ionic chemistry. The use of light as an energy source for chemical processes has piqued the curiosity of chemists since the inception of scientific chemistry. Based on the natural photosynthetic phenomenon, which relies on the sunlight-mediated conversion of simple molecules into broad complex molecules, recently visible light is considered the most versatile renewable, eco-compatible, and benign source as compared to unaffordable and unsafe procedures. However, the visible light-mediated radical chemistry remained obscure, most likely due to the radicals' infamous properties and the fact that experimental setups for visible-light reactions were less frequent in organic synthesis. After decades, recently, synthetic organic chemists have accomplished great success in synthesizing value-added intermediates thanks to photocatalysis which uses light to excite transition metal complexes and organic dyes, resulting in the mild production of free radicals. 

In general, the interaction between an organic compound and an excited state photocatalyst leads to the formation of a broad variety of highly reactive species. By recognizing the fundamental chemistry of each reactive species, a diverse set of potent complexity-building synthetic transformations has been established. 

In line with this, our research is completely focusing on developing diverse photoredox catalytic approaches based on the photoinduced single electron transfer (SET) process, photoinduced energy transfer (EnT) process, and proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) process for the selective carbon-carbon, and carbon-heteroatom bond formation reactions.