Issue 1, 2024

Improved transition metal photosensitizers to drive advances in photocatalysis

Abstract

To function effectively in a photocatalytic application, a photosensitizer's light absorption, excited-state lifetime, and redox potentials, both in the ground state and excited state, are critically important. The absorption profile is particularly relevant to applications involving solar harvesting, whereas the redox potentials and excited-state lifetimes determine the thermodynamics, kinetics, and quantum yields of photoinduced redox processes. This perspective article focuses on synthetic inorganic and organometallic approaches to optimize these three characteristics of transition-metal based photosensitizers. We include our own work in these areas, which has focused extensively on exceptionally strong cyclometalated iridium photoreductants that enable challenging reductive photoredox transformations on organic substrates, and more recent work which has led to improved solar harvesting in charge-transfer copper(I) chromophores, an emerging class of earth-abundant compounds particularly relevant to solar-energy applications. We also extensively highlight many other complementary strategies for optimizing these parameters and highlight representative examples from the recent literature. It remains a significant challenge to simultaneously optimize all three of these parameters at once, since improvements in one often come at the detriment of the others. These inherent trade-offs and approaches to obviate or circumvent them are discussed throughout.

Graphical abstract: Improved transition metal photosensitizers to drive advances in photocatalysis

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Article information

Article type
Perspective
Submitted
30 Aug. 2023
Accepted
22 Nov. 2023
First published
24 Nov. 2023
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY license

Chem. Sci., 2024,15, 77-94

Improved transition metal photosensitizers to drive advances in photocatalysis

D. Kim, V. Q. Dang and T. S. Teets, Chem. Sci., 2024, 15, 77 DOI: 10.1039/D3SC04580C

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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