New paper in Nature Communications

New paper on electrocyclic photochemistry published in Nature Communications

Yusong’s paper on electrocyclic ring-opening was just published in Nature Communications! We used a combination of experiments at SLAC’s ultrafast electron diffraction facility and simulations to track down mechanistic details of electrocyclic photochemistry in the molecule alpha-terpinene. By following the structure changes of the molecule as it relaxes into the pericyclic minimum of the excited state, the photochemical “transition state” of the reaction, we gain some new perspective on the reasons for an important property of electrocyclic reactions, their stereospecificity. A news story on the paper can be found here: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2023-05-25-first-researchers-capture-fleeting-transition-state-ring-shaped-molecules-excited The link to the paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38513-6