Visible Light Photocatalysis: The Development of Photocatalytic Radical Ion Cycloadditions

Photochemistry has the potential to significantly impact multiple aspects of chemical synthesis, in part because photoinduced reactions can be used to construct molecular architectures that would otherwise be difficult to produce. Nevertheless, organic chemists have been slow to embrace photochemical synthesis because of technical complications associated with the use of ultraviolet light. Our laboratory has been part of an effort to design synthetically useful reactions that utilize visible light. This strategy enables the synthesis of a diverse range of organic structures by generation of a variety of reactive intermediates under exceptionally mild conditions. This Perspective article describes the reasoning that led to the conception of our first experiments in this area, the features of our reaction design that have been most powerful in the discovery of new processes, and a few of the possible future areas in which visible light photocatalysis might have a large impact.