Periodical reports: Organic and computational aspects

Introduction and review of the years 2010–2011

Angelo Albini

DOI: 10.1039/9781849734882-00001

After a short introduction on the changes adopted in the format of this series, some representative findings on photochemistry and applications published in 2010–11 are reviewed.

1 Introduction

The present volume, no. 40 in the series 'Photochemistry' of the Specialist Reports published by the Royal Society of Chemistry makes a further step forward in the direction indicated in volumes 37–39. This choice arises from the idea that the role of photochemistry has changed by a large degree in the more than 40 years intervening since then the series was planned (volume 1 was published in 1970). In the Sixties, photochemistry was a young science (see below, however) that had been just established as a consistent discipline and the advancement in the rationalization of key issues was pointed out year after year by each volume. This fact, along with the much greater work then required for literature search, made these series a much welcome opportunity for the many scientists then entering the field and for anybody wishing to keep abreast with the advancement of this discipline in a time-effective way. Nowadays, literature search is done in a much faster, although not necessarily dependable, way, while photochemistry has become a pervasive science with a variety of remarkably diverse applications.

Thus, the problem is not so much that of making available new notions to the photochemical comunity, but rather that of offering the information to various communities of scientists, some of which do not consider themselves full-time photochemists, and facilitate the exchange between them. Indeed, differently for example from some spectroscopic methods, where having a crytically compiled list of the data published each year remains useful, offering inventories of the new publications in photochemistry is probably not sufficient. Thus, after that with the previous two volumes the delay accumulated had been eliminated, it was felt that a structure change was advisable. Thus, next (yearly) volumes will be prepared in the following way.

The periodical on the different photochemical disciplines will be published every other year. The biennal coverage should help in clarifying the development of specific studies and their significance for photochemistry in general, while it is hoped that the delay in reporting part of the data has a limited effect, because appropriate literature surveys are generally available. Of course, the short review of the last two years that is done in this chapter refers to the whole field of photochemistry, indeed is meant to give a flavour of the large field of applications.

The specific reports mentioned above will correspond to about a half of each volume, the other half being occupied by highlights, prepared by well known specialists. For the reasons mentioned above, these will be mainly devoted to applicative aspects of photochemistry.

It is hoped that this dual structure may contribute to maintaining some connection among the various fields of photochemistry, whether these refer to the core discipline or to a practical application.

As a result, volume 39 contains reports on spectroscopic and physicochemical aspects (coverage: year 2010), as well on inorganic aspects and solar energy conversion (among the Authors, F. Punturiero and K. Kalyanasundaran contribute for the first time to this series), while organic and theoretical aspects are reviewed in volume 40 (two years coverage, 2010 and 2011, Y. Liu contributing for the first time).

As for the highlights, these had been introduced in volumes 37 and 38 in the number of three and five respectively and should remain in that range, as it is the case for the present volume. Next to scientific reports, a historic account on two of the main photochemical societies, the Asian and Oceanian and the European, are presented.

Two further topics should be rapidly mentioned. The first one as to do with history. In July 2010 a minisymposium for celebrating the 100th birthday of photochemistry was organized. The choice of the date may be discussed. This originated from the recognizment that, although the action of solar light on a variety of chemicals had been long known and some photochemical reactions had been well described in the 19th century and earlier, it is only through the work by Giacomo Ciamician, Emanuele Paternò, Hans Stobbe and a few others that a sufficient number of reactions was thoroughly studied, so that generalizations could be made. The work by these scientists was for the main part published by 1910 and by that year many – if not most of the – photochemical processes that today are applied in the lab and taught in the classes were known.

Apart from some historic note, the meeting attempted to re-create the spirit of a hundred years ago, when photochemistry seemed to be the science of the future. This was done through seven lectures figuring out what may be the contribution of photochemistry to the development of chemistry (solar light conversion, organic synthesis, molecular machines, single crystal photochromism, computation and photochemistry, new chemistry and biology via singlet oxygen, photomedicine), as well as by asking every participant which he/she felt the most important contribution photochemistry may give in the future.

Finally, one may ask the question, which is the place of photochemistry at present? Perhaps not the science of the future, as it was in the first decade of the 20th century, nor it is expanding as it did in the 1950 and 1960. Certainly, it pervades chemistry, physics, biology and allows advancement that would not be possible without the insight we now have of photochemical processes.

One way for assessing how important is deemed this discipline is looking for the most often red papers. As an example, the American Chemical Society publishes a list...