Laser-assisted high-pressure chemical reactions.

The growing need for production methods with a reduced environmental impact drives the search for new synthetic approaches in chemistry. Here we report the state of the art of a recently developed branch of ultra-high-pressure chemistry, employing high pressure to create the necessary reaction conditions to transform simple hydrocarbons and monochromatic light to trigger and direct, according to selective paths, the chemical reaction. For the available systems studied up to now, we will provide an overview of the different effects that can be obtained by the combined use of pressure and laser light.