The last post addressed the concept of “steric clashes” in a pericyclic reaction transition state as an extension of the time honoured practice of building molecular models to analyse reaction outcomes. A modern computer generated model might express this in terms of a NCI (non-covalent-interaction) surface. A few posts ago, I had looked at some “molecules of the year” for 2020, one of which was a “figure-eight” twisted dodecaporphyrin in which an aspect of the reported[1] geometry had struck me as potentially lacking features due to the so-called non-covalent dispersion or van der Waals attractions. So I am revisiting here by adding the NCI surface for this molecule and one other.
References
- M. Rickhaus, M. Jirasek, L. Tejerina, H. Gotfredsen, M.D. Peeks, R. Haver, H. Jiang, T.D.W. Claridge, and H.L. Anderson, "Global aromaticity at the nanoscale", Nature Chemistry, vol. 12, pp. 236-241, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0398-3