Posts Tagged ‘excess kinetic energy’

The weirdest bond of all? Laplacian isosurfaces for [1.1.1]Propellane.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

In this post, I will take a look at what must be the most extraordinary small molecule ever made (especially given that it is merely a hydrocarbon). Its peculiarity is the region indicated by the dashed line below. Is it a bond? If so, what kind, given that it would exist sandwiched between two inverted carbon atoms?

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Looking at bonds in a different way: the Laplacian.

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The Cheshire cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comes and goes at will, and engages Alice with baffling philosophical points. Chemical bonds are a bit like that too. In the previous post, we saw how (some) bonds can be tuned to be strong or weak simply by how a lone pair of electrons elsewhere in the molecule is oriented with respect to the bond. Here I explore another way of looking at bonds. To start, we must introduce a quantity known as ∇2ρ(r), henceforth termed the Laplacian of the electron density ρ(r).

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