Pentavalent nitrogen and boron

The previous posts have seen how a molecule containing a hypervalent carbon atom can be designed by making a series of logical chemical connections. Another logical step is to investigate whether the adjacent atoms in the periodic table may exhibit similar effects (C2+ ≡ B+ ≡ N3+ ≡ Be ≡ O4+). So here are reported some results (B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) ) for boron, beryllium and nitrogen, for the general tetramethyl substituted system shown below

Pentavalency across a series

X Charge X-C length, Å ρ(r) C-X ELF integration ν-Trampoline, cm-1 ν X-H, cm-1 Repository
N 2 1.616 .172 1.14 883 3417 10042/to-2439
C 1 1.580 .195 1.10 970 3291 10042/to-2438
B 0 1.649 .136 1.06 949 2746 10042/to-2440
Be -1 1.817 .064 0.98 797 1887 10042/to-2441

The systems H, C and B are stable in the sense that the C4v-symmetric calculated geometry has only positive calculated force constants (Be has a small negative frequency). All show bond critical points in the  X-C region (although these bonds are clearly  bent) and X-H region, and significant integrations for the X-C disynaptic basins in the  ELF analysis. The boron analogue is also of interest as being a neutral rather than a charged molecule, and therefore may be a worthy target for synthetic effort.

Henry Rzepa

Henry Rzepa is Emeritus Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College London.

Recent Posts

Internet Archeology: reviving a 2001 article published in the Internet Journal of Chemistry.

In the mid to late 1990s as the Web developed, it was becoming more obvious…

1 month ago

Detecting anomeric effects in tetrahedral carbon bearing four oxygen substituents.

I have written a few times about the so-called "anomeric effect", which relates to stereoelectronic…

1 month ago

Data Citation – a snapshot of the chemical landscape.

The recent release of the DataCite Data Citation corpus, which has the stated aim of…

2 months ago

Mechanistic templates computed for the Grubbs alkene-metathesis reaction.

Following on from my template exploration of the Wilkinson hydrogenation catalyst, I now repeat this…

2 months ago

3D Molecular model visualisation: 3 Million atoms +

In the late 1980s, as I recollected here the equipment needed for real time molecular…

3 months ago

The Macintosh computer at 40.

On 24th January 1984, the Macintosh computer was released, as all the media are informing…

3 months ago