This course does not have a textbook. I will try to give you comprehensive notes and references to original literature and other books/sources as we go. There are some good photochemistry books, there just isn't one that I would like to use exclusively. Here are some texts that you should know about, they are linked to the ASU Library link. I will be using some combination of these texts as my main resources for lecture preparation, especially the Turro, Michl and Gilbert/Baggott books.

The first real textbook on photochemistry was "Photochemistry" by J. G. Calvert and J. N. Pitts. It was the original "bible". It now seems a bit dated, but it is still definitely worth looking through the next time you are in the library. It was pretty comprehensive at the time and covered more than just organic processes. Altogether an impressive work

The best introductory text is "Molecular Photochemistry" by N. J. Turro. It was the first good introductory photochemistry textbook from the organic perspective, although it is not up to date and is very much not detailed enough for us. Nevertheless, this is where I usually send students first.

This book was followed by the classic "Modern Molecular Photochemistry" by N. J. Turro. This is still one of the best out there. It is a little idiosyncratic, but nobody explains and relates difficult complicated concepts the way that Turro does. Read it and enjoy it! As it was published in 1978, it too is now somewhat out of date (it does not include electron transfer, for example). For quite some time now I have been hearing rumors of an updated version from Turro, Scaiano and Ramamurthy, but nothing has appeared yet.

Perhaps the best book to follow that from Turro is "Essentials of Molecular Photochemistry" by A. Gilbert and J. Baggott. This is an interesting collaboration between a physical (Baggott) and an organic chemist (Gilbert). It is more conventional than the Turro book and is a little more up-to-date and comprehensive. Unfortunately it is out of print, and an undergraduate student borrowed my copy and did not return it (I am still furious about this several years later!) and the library only has one copy and I have it! Furthermore, I will have to keep it for the duration of the course so that I can prepare lecture notes, sorry!

The best theoretical photochemistry book is undoubtedly "Electronic Aspects of Organic Photochemistry" by J. Michl and V. Bonacic-Koutecky. This book contains everything that you will ever want to know about the fundamental aspects of photochemical and photophysical processes and more, written by the best current practitioners. It is very detailed and quantum oriented, frankly I can't follow everything in it, but I wish I did! Michl is just phenomenally brilliant!

Another interesting book authored by Josef Michl is "Excited States and Photochemistry of Organic Molecules" by M. Klessinger and J. Michl. This book is a more chemical book than the one above, and it deliberately avoids the heavy quantum stuff. I quite like it.

If Josef Michl is one of my favorite practicing photochemists, then Nick Turro is undoubtedly another. Nick is a hugely prolific and influential chemist. He is also an amazing and unique teacher. He has some very interesting photochemical teaching material on the web in the form of a "Modern Molecular Photochemistry Course". There are some links to lectures on video there. You should watch a couple of them, just to enjoy Nick's lecture style if nothing else.

Finally, there are a couple of places that you can go for reference material related to photochemistry.

The "The Handbook of Photochemistry" by S. Murov, I Carmichael and G. L. Hug contains of wealth of information on excited state energies, spectra, specifications of light sources/filters, methods of actinometry etc.

One of the best overall summaries of the practical aspects of photochemistry, i.e. instrumentation, techniques etc., in addition to numerical tables of energies and other molecular properties was published in two volumes as one of the series of CRC handbooks, "CRC Handbook of Organic Photochemistry", edited by J. C. Scaiano. Most of the first volume was written by me, and I sincerely hope that a lot of people are using it because writing those sections almost killed me!