photochemical reaction

photochemical reaction, a chemical reaction initiated by the absorption of energy in the form of light. The consequence of molecules’ absorbing light is the creation of transient excited states whose chemical and physical properties differ greatly from the original molecules. These new chemical species can fall apart, change to new structures, combine with each other or other molecules, or transfer electrons, hydrogen atoms, protons, or their electronic excitation energy to other molecules. Excited states are stronger acids and stronger reductants than the original ground states.

It is this last property that is crucial in the most important of all photochemical processes, photosynthesis, upon which almost all life on Earth depends. Through photosynthesis, plants convert the energy of sunlight into stored chemical energy by forming carbohydrates from atmospheric carbon dioxide and water and releasing molecular oxygen as a byproduct. Both carbohydrates and oxygen are needed to sustain animal life. Many other processes in nature are photochemical. The ability to see the world starts with a photochemical reaction in the eye, in which retinal, a molecule in the photoreceptor cell rhodopsin, isomerizes (or changes shape) about a double bond after absorbing light. Vitamin D, essential for normal bone and teeth development and kidney function, is formed in the skin of animals after exposure of the chemical 7-dehydrocholesterol to sunlight. Ozone protects Earth’s surface from intense, deep ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, which is damaging to DNA and is formed in the stratosphere by a photochemical dissociation (separation) of molecular oxygen (O₂) into individual oxygen atoms, followed by subsequent reaction of those oxygen atoms with molecular oxygen to produce ozone (O₃). UV radiation that does get through the ozone layer photochemically damages DNA, which in turn introduces mutations on its replication that can lead to skin cancer.

Photochemical reactions and the properties of excited states are also critical in many commercial processes and devices. Photography and xerography are both based upon photochemical processes, while the manufacture of semiconductor chips or the preparation of masks for printing newspapers relies on UV light to destroy molecules in selected regions of polymer masks.

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History

The use of photochemistry by humans began in the late Bronze Age by 1500 bce when Canaanite peoples settled the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean. They prepared a purple fast dye (now called 6,6’-dibromoindigotin) from a local mollusk, using a photochemical reaction, and its use was later mentioned in Iron Age documents that described earlier times, such as the epics of Homer and the Pentateuch. In fact, the word Canaan may mean “reddish purple.” This dye, known as Tyrian purple, was later used to colour the cloaks of the Roman Caesars.

In the simplest photochemical process, excited states can emit light in the form of fluorescence or phosphorescence. In 1565, while investigating a Mexican wood that relieved the excruciating pain of urinary stones, Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes made an aqueous (water-based) extract of the wood, which glowed blue when exposed to sunlight. In 1853 English physicist George Stokes noticed that a quinine solution exposed to a lightning flash gave off a brief blue glow, which he called fluorescence. Stokes realized that lightning gave off energy in the form of UV light. The quinine molecules absorbed this energy and then reemitted it as less-energetic blue radiation. (Tonic water also glows blue because of quinine, which is added to provide a bitter taste.)

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Types of Chemical Reactions

In the 16th century Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini recognized that a diamond exposed to sunlight and then placed into the shade gave off a blue glow that lasted for many seconds. This process is called phosphorescence and is distinguished from fluorescence by the length of time it persists. Synthetic inorganic phosphors were prepared in 1603 by cobbler-alchemist Vincenzo Cascariolo of Bologna by reducing the natural mineral barium sulfate with charcoal to synthesize barium sulfide. Exposure to sunlight caused the phosphor to emit a long-lived yellow glow, and it was sufficiently regarded that many traveled to Bologna to collect the mineral (called Bologna stones) and make their own phosphor. Subsequent work by Italian astronomer Niccolò Zucchi in 1652 demonstrated that the phosphorescence is emitted at longer wavelengths than needed to excite the phosphor; for instance, blue phosphorescence follows UV excitation in diamonds. In addition, in 1728 Italian physicist Francesco Zanotti showed that phosphorescence keeps the same colour even when the colour of the excitation radiation is altered to increasing energy. These same properties are also true of fluorescence.

The modern era of organic photochemistry began in 1866, when Russian chemist Carl Julius von Fritzche discovered that a concentrated anthracene solution exposed to UV radiation would fall from the solution as a precipitate. This precipitation happens because the anthracene molecules join together in pairs, or dimers, which are no longer soluble.

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In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists developed a fundamental understanding of the basis for fluorescence and phosphorescence. The foundation was the realization that the materials (dyes and phosphors) must have the capability of absorbing optical radiation (the Grotthus-Draper law). German chemist Robert Bunsen and English chemist Henry Roscoe demonstrated in 1859 that the amount of fluorescence or phosphorescence was determined by the total amount of optical radiation absorbed and not the energy content (i.e., the wavelength, colour, or frequency) of the radiation. In 1908 German physicist Johannes Stark realized that absorption of radiation was a consequence of a quantum transition, and this was further extended by German physicist Albert Einstein in 1912 to include the conservation of energy—the internal energy introduced to the molecule by absorption must be equal to the total of the energies of each individual process of energy dissipation. Implicit in the previous sentence is the photochemical equivalence law, also called the Stark-Einstein law, which states that a single molecule may absorb exactly one photon of light. The amount of energy absorbed by a substance is the product of the number of photons absorbed and the energy of each photon, but it is the radiation intensity and the number of absorbed photons per second, and not their energy, that determine the extent of photochemical processes.

The contemporary quantum mechanical description of the absorption of optical radiation involves promotion of an electron from a low-energy orbital to a more energetic orbital. This is synonymous with saying that the molecule (or atom) is promoted from its ground state (or lowest energy state) to an excited state (or higher energy state). This excited-state molecule often has drastically different properties from the ground-state molecule. In addition, a molecule’s excited state is short-lived because a sequence of events will either return it to its original ground state or form a new chemical species that will eventually reach its own ground state.