Photonics

LASER or LED

We are interested in photon induced processes for a while now because of our former scientific work in the field. In chemical synthesis it is well known that high energy photons (λ<400nm) can induce a reaction by exciting the molecules to a higher energy state, which will lead to the formation of reactive species or rearrange the molecule itself. These processes usually ended up with isomerization or redox reaction. For a long time the two main sources of photon was Mercury vapour lamps and LASERS.

Nowadays LEDs come in to the scene because of the evolution of semiconductors with high energy band gap. The price of the corresponding devices are much lower compared to LASERS, however the spectral properties are different. We currently working on a novel LED-based reactor for chemical synthesis which can be a competitive for LASER based approaches.