Posts Tagged ‘Steve Bachrach’
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013
This is a continuation of the discussion started on Steve Bachrach’s blog about a molecule with a very short H…H interaction involving two Si-H groups with enforced proximity. It had been inferred from the X-ray structure[1] that the H…H distance was in the region of 1.50Å. It’s that cis-butene all over again! So is that H…H region a bond? Is it attractive or repulsive? Go read Steve’s blog first.
(more…)
References
-
J. Zong, J.T. Mague, and R.A. Pascal, "Exceptional Steric Congestion in an in,in-Bis(hydrosilane)", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 135, pp. 13235-13237, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja407398w
Tags:Interesting chemistry, Postscript, Steve Bachrach, X-ray
Posted in Uncategorised | 17 Comments »
Sunday, June 2nd, 2013
A few years ago, we published an article which drew a formal analogy between chemistry and iTunes (sic)[1]. iTunes was the first really large commercial digital music library, and a feature under-the-skin was the use of meta-data to aid discoverability of any of the 10 million (26M in 2013) or so individual items in the store.‡ The analogy to digital chemistry and discoverability of the 70 or so million known molecules is, we argued, a good one.
(more…)
References
-
O. Casher, and H.S. Rzepa, "SemanticEye: A Semantic Web Application to Rationalize and Enhance Chemical Electronic Publishing", Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, vol. 46, pp. 2396-2411, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ci060139e
Tags:Apple, BBC, Chemical IT, digital photography, engineer, Google, Historical, HTML, metadata, opendata, RDF, search term, Steve Bachrach, United Kingdom
Posted in Uncategorised | No Comments »
Sunday, January 13th, 2013
We tend to think of simple hydrocarbons as relatively inert and un-interesting molecules. However, a recent article[1], which was in fact highlighted by Steve Bachrach on his blog , asks what “The Last Globally Stable Extended Alkane” might be. In other words, at what stage does a straight-chain hydrocarbon fold back upon itself, and no significant population of the linear form remain? The answer was suggested to be C17H36. I thought I might subject this conformation to an NCI (non-covalent-interaction) analysis.
(more…)
References
-
N.O.B. Lüttschwager, T.N. Wassermann, R.A. Mata, and M.A. Suhm, "The Last Globally Stable Extended Alkane", Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 52, pp. 463-466, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201202894
Tags:conformational analysis, Steve Bachrach, Tutorial material
Posted in Uncategorised | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, September 12th, 2012
Here is a challenge: what is the longest C-C bond actually determined (in which both carbon termini are sp3 hybridised)? I pose this question since Steve Bachrach has posted on how to stabilize long bonds by attractive dispersive interactions, and more recently commenting on what the longest straight chain alkane might be before dispersive interaction start to fold it (the answer appears to be C17).
(more…)
Tags:Cambridge, Interesting chemistry, Steve Bachrach
Posted in Uncategorised | 8 Comments »
Monday, July 16th, 2012
Singleton and co-workers have produced some wonderful work showing how dynamic effects and not just transition states can control the outcome of reactions. Steve Bachrach’s blog contains many examples, including this recent one.
(more…)
Tags:dielectric, energy surface, final product, Interesting chemistry, Molecular dynamics, potential energy surface, Reaction Mechanism, Singleton & co., Steve Bachrach, substitution products
Posted in Uncategorised | 3 Comments »
Monday, September 26th, 2011
To (mis)quote Oscar Wilde again, ““To lose one methyl group may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Here, I refer to the (past) tendency of molecular modellers to simplify molecular structures. Thus in 1977, quantum molecular modelling, even at the semi-empirical level, was beset by lost groups. One of my early efforts (DOI: 10.1021/ja00465a005) was selected for study because it had nothing left to lose; the mass spectrometric fragmentation of the radical cations of methane and ethane. Methyl, phenyl and other “large” groups were routinely replaced by hydrogen in order to enable the study. Cations indeed were always of interest to modellers; the relative lack of electrons almost always meant unusual or interesting structures and reactions (including this controversial species, DOI: 10.1021/ja00444a012). Inured to such functional loss, we modellers forgot that (unless in a mass spectrometer), cations have to have a counter anion. Here I explore one example of the model being complete(d).
(more…)
Tags:bonded systems, energy difference drops, free energy, Interesting chemistry, model, Oscar, potential energy surface, Steve Bachrach, using perchlorate
Posted in Uncategorised | 7 Comments »
Sunday, July 10th, 2011
Steve Bachrach has blogged on the reaction shown below. If it were a pericyclic cycloaddition, both new bonds would form simultaneously, as shown with the indicated arrow pushing. Ten electrons would be involved, and in theory, the transition state would have 4n+2 aromaticity. In fact Fernandez, Sierra and Torres have reported that they can trap an intermediate zwitterion 2, and in this sense therefore, the reaction is not pericyclic but nucleophilic addition from the imine lone pair to the carbonyl of the ketene (it finds the half way stage convivial). But this got me thinking. Does this reaction have any pericyclic character at all? And if so, could it be enhanced by design?
(more…)
Tags:antarafacial, cycloaddition, energy, Fernandez, Interesting chemistry, Möbius, pericyclic, Sierra, Steve Bachrach, Torres
Posted in Uncategorised | 2 Comments »
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
The interface between physics, chemistry (and materials science) can be a fascinating one. Here I show a carbon nanotorus, devised by physicists[1] a few years ago. It is a theoretical species, and was predicted to have a colossal paramagnetic moment.
(more…)
References
-
L. Liu, G.Y. Guo, C.S. Jayanthi, and S.Y. Wu, "Colossal Paramagnetic Moments in Metallic Carbon Nanotori", Physical Review Letters, vol. 88, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.217206
Tags:chiroptical, General, Interesting chemistry, metallic carbon, nanotorus, Steve Bachrach
Posted in Uncategorised | 6 Comments »
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
Stereo-induction is, lets face it, a subtle phenomenon. The ratio of two stereoisomers formed in a reaction can be detected very accurately by experiment, and when converted to a free energy difference using ΔG = -RT Ln K, this can amount to quite a small value (between 0.5 – 1.5 kcal/mol). Can modelling reproduce effects originating from such small energy differences? Well one system that has been argued about now for several decades is shown below as 1.
(more…)
Tags:chiroptical, energy differences, free energy difference, hybridization, interaction energy, Interesting chemistry, Steve Bachrach
Posted in Uncategorised | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Stoyanov, Stoyanova and Reed recently published on the structure of the hydrogen ion in water. Their model was H(H2O)n+, where n=6 (DOI: 10.1021/ja9101826). This suggestion was picked up by Steve Bachrach on his blog, where he added a further three structures to the proposed list, and noted of course that with this type of system there must be a fair chance that the true structure consists of a well-distributed Boltzmann population of a number of almost iso-energetic forms.
(more…)
Tags:animation, gas phase model, General, Interesting chemistry, Steve Bachrach
Posted in Uncategorised | 1 Comment »