The first visible-light driven aerobic oxidation for the direct selenation of (hetero)arenes has been developed at room temperature, providing an eco-friendly, atom-economical protocol to prepare unsymmetrical selenides from easily accessible diselenides.

Substrates in excited state differ significantly from the corresponding ground state so that they are treated as different chemical species with diverse physical properties and chemical reactivity. Therefore, applying photocatalytic systems to activate substrates becomes increasingly popular. Although photosensitizers serve as the core of the photocatalytic reaction, the design of a photosensitizer has not been taken for granted. By modifying ligands of organometallic complexes to optimize properties of photosensitizers, we successfully achieved a series of iridium complexes with long excited triplet-state lifetime, high triplet excited-state energy, strong absorption, and robust stability. The efficacies of the prepared iridium complexes as photosensitizers were evaluated toward various challenging photocycloaddition reactions (e.g., thia-Paternò–Büchi reaction and multicomponent one-pot aza-photocyclization) between heterocyclic compound maleimides and unsaturated moieties that are not efficient to complete with well-established photosensitizers.

A direct, redox-neutral, highly atom-economical and metal-free aerobic method for the synthesis of multi-substituted olefins via simply coupling ammonium thiocyanate with activated ketones is described.

The aerobic dehydrogenative cyclization of alkenes with easily accessible diselenides facilitated by visible light is reported. Notably, the features of this transition-metal-free protocol are pronounced efficiency and practicality, good functional group tolerance, atom economy, and high sustainability, since ambient air and visible light are adequate for the clean construction of five- and six membered heterocycles in yields of up to 98%.

The first visible-light enabled metal-free aerobic protocol for one-pot synthesis of benzoin bis-ethers from alkenes and alcohols has been developed at room temperature.