Reversible-deactivation radical polymerization (RDRP) has witnessed remarkable growth and is now recognized as one of the most versatile and widely used tool to synthesize polymers with well-defined structures and architectures, making it a potential technical for industrial applications [
1-
11]. Recently, organic photoredox catalysis offers a powerful approach to activate organic substrates, generating organic radicals for diverse transformations under mild and metal-free conditions [
8,
12]. This development has significantly advanced the progress of RDRP. In photoredox-mediated RDRP [
13-
22], the photocatalytic cycle usually proceeds
via two pathways for the generation of propagating P
n• and X
• radicals (
Fig. 1A). The oxidative quenching pathway [
23-
26] relies on a strongly reducing excited PC* to achieve the single electron reduction of the dormant P
n-X polymers, resulting in P
n• radical for propagation and a catalyst radical cation (PC
•+) to oxidize the X
- to X
• for the deactivation of the polymerization. However, organic PCs enabling such process have historically been rare [
8,
12,
27-
29]. In addition, the strong oxidizing power of PC
•+ could lead to undesirable side reactions [
26]. Alternatively, the reductive quenching pathway [
30,
31] in photoredox catalysis usually requires a stoichiometric amount of electron donors (
e.g., organic amine, NR
3) to reduce the excited PC*, giving PC
•− and NR
3•+. The PC
•− then reduces P
n-X to P
n• for propagation and NR
3•+ oxidizes X
- to X
• for the deactivation of the polymerization. Recently, a consecutive photoinduced electron transfer strategy was successfully explored for photoinduced organocatalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) [
32-
34] in the presence of stoichiometry electron donors [
35]. It is important to note that the photoinduced RDRP reactions of organic halides, such as photo-ATRP reactions, typically exhibit effective control over polymerization with Br and Cl chain end functionalities. The C-I bond tends to be unstable, leading to an inevitable degenerative transfer process that usually results in moderate control over polymerization [
36,
37]. Consequently, the use of alkyl iodides in ATRP is generally inefficient [
38]. Nonetheless, for photocontrolled iodine-mediated RDRP, Goto, Kaji, and their colleagues have documented elegant photoinduced organocatalyzed reversible complexation-mediated polymerization (RCMP). In this process, dormant P
n-I polymers undergo homolysis in the presence of the catalyst, producing P
n• and I
• radicals [
39-
42]. In this context, Cheng, Zhang and co-workers successfully employed solvent as halogen bonding acceptor to mediate the homolysis of P
n-I polymers (
Fig. 1B) [
43,
44]. Furthermore, Matyjaszewski and co-workers reported an iodine-mediated photo-ATRP in aqueous media, where the alkyl iodide initiators are generated
in situ from alkyl bromides [
45].