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What has light ever done for chemistry?

Nature Chemistry volume 8, pages 734–735 (2016)Cite this article

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Ksenija Glusac takes us on a journey through some of the most important light-driven reactions upon which nature and chemists rely.

The UN's International Year of Light has inspired a number of perspectives reviewing the role of light in chemistry1,2,3,4 and a quick glance at these articles gives the reader a clear overview of how chemists use light as a major analytical tool. It's a standard and well-trodden path: as soon as we make a new molecule, we immediately hit the poor little thing with many different frequencies of light while trying to work out its structure (for example, X-ray and NMR spectroscopy) and kinetic behaviour (for example, time-resolved laser spectroscopy2). However, as Bach already noticed5, these reviews place surprisingly little emphasis on the role of light in photochemistry. While it's clear that we can use light to characterize our molecules and materials, can we use it to make them? And can we learn from how biology uses photochemistry? Cutting to the chase, the answer is yes, and I'd like to give you a short tour of some of chemistry's finest photochemical reactions and their utility in natural and man-made devices.

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  1. Ksenija Glusac is in the Department of Chemistry and the Center for Photochemical Sciences, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403-0001, USA,

    Ksenija Glusac

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  1. Ksenija Glusac
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Correspondence to Ksenija Glusac.

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Glusac, K. What has light ever done for chemistry?. Nature Chem 8, 734–735 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2582

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