A Photochemical Probe for Single Electron Transfer in Nucleophilic Aliphatic Substitution: Evidence for Geminate Radical Coupling in the Solvent Cage

Article abstract of DOI:10.1021/ja00115a001

A major effort to establish single electron transfer (SET) as an important pathway in nucleophilic aliphatic substitution reactions has involved the use of cyclizable probes, e.g., 6-iodo-5,5-dimethyl-1-hexene.In order to examine the partition between cyclization and direct radical-radical recombination, we have investigated the ground-state and excited-state chemistry of the 9-phenylfluorenyl anion (9PF-) with neopentyl-type iodides.It has been shown that 9PF- does not react with Me3CCH2I, but it does undergo efficient reaction upon irradiation (Φ=1.0) to yield nucleophilic aliphatic substitution products.With the sterically analogous cyclizable probe 6-iodo-5,5-dimethyl-1-hexene, no ground-state reaction is observed.However, both cyclized and uncyclized products of substitution, 9PFR_c and 9PFR_u, are produced upon irradiation.Thus photoproducts clearly involving electron-transfer-induced radical intermediates can result without acommpanying free-radical cyclization.These results suggest that, although the observation of cyclized products in the reaction of a cyclizable radical probe with a nucleophile is evidence of a radical intermediate, the absence of such cyclized products does not require the absence of radical intermediates.