George Olah passed away on March 8th. He was part of the generation of scientists in the post-war 1950s who had access to chemical instrumentation that truly revolutionised chemistry. In particular he showed how the then newly available NMR spectroscopy illuminated structures of cations in solvents such “Magic acid“. The obituaries will probably mention his famous “feud” with H. C. Brown over the structure of the norbornyl cation (X=CH2+), implicated in the mechanism of many a solvolysis reaction that characterised the golden period of physical organic chemistry just before and after WWII.
Archive for March 10th, 2017
George Olah and the norbornyl cation.
Friday, March 10th, 2017Ammonium tetraphenylborate and the mystery of its π-facial hydrogen bonding.
Friday, March 10th, 2017A few years back, I did a post about the Pirkle reagent[1] and the unusual π-facial hydrogen bonding structure[2] it exhibits. For the Pirkle reagent, this bonding manifests as a close contact between the acidic OH hydrogen and the edge of a phenyl ring; the hydrogen bond is off-centre from the middle of the aryl ring. Here I update the topic, with a new search of the CSD (Cambridge structure database), but this time looking at the positional preference of that bond and whether it is on or off-centre.
References
- H.S. Rzepa, M.L. Webb, A.M.Z. Slawin, and D.J. Williams, "? Facial hydrogen bonding in the chiral resolving agent (S)-2,2,2-trifluoro-1-(9-anthryl)ethanol and its racemic modification", Journal of the Chemical Society, Chemical Communications, pp. 765, 1991. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c39910000765
- H.S. Rzepa, M.H. Smith, and M.L. Webb, "A crystallographic AM1 and PM3 SCF-MO investigation of strong OH ⋯π-alkene and alkyne hydrogen bonding interactions", J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 2, pp. 703-707, 1994. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/P29940000703