Posts Tagged ‘microwave’

Interactions responsible for the lowest energy structure of the trimer of fluoroethanol.

Friday, October 23rd, 2015

Steve Bachrach on his own blog has commented on a recent article[1] discussing the structure of the trimer of fluoroethanol. Rather than the expected triangular form with three OH—O hydrogen bonds, the lowest energy form only had two such bonds, but it matched the microwave data much better. Here I explore this a bit more.

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References

  1. J. Thomas, X. Liu, W. Jäger, and Y. Xu, "Unusual H‐Bond Topology and Bifurcated H‐bonds in the 2‐Fluoroethanol Trimer", Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 54, pp. 11711-11715, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201505934

The dawn of organic reaction mechanism: the prequel.

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

Following on from Armstrong’s almost electronic theory of chemistry in 1887-1890, and Beckmann’s radical idea around the same time that molecules undergoing transformations might do so via a reaction mechanism involving unseen intermediates (in his case, a transient enol of a ketone) I here describe how these concepts underwent further evolution in the early 1920s. My focus is on Edith Hilda Usherwood, who was then a PhD student at Imperial College working under the supervision of Martha Whitely.1

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