Carbenes structure

The triazole 76, which is more accurately portrayed as the nucleophilic carbene structure 76a, acts as a formyl anion equivalent by reaction with alkyl halides and subsequent reductive cleavage to give aldehydes as shown (75TL1889). The benzoin reaction may be considered as resulting in the net addition of a benzoyl anion to a benzaldehyde, and the chiral triazolium salt 77 has been reported to be an efficient asymmetric catalyst for this, giving the products (/ )-ArCH(OH)COAr, in up to 86% e.e. (96HCA1217). In the closely related intramolecular Stetter reaction e.e.s of up to 74% were obtained (96HCA1899). 

Carbene structure, of thiazolium salts in basic medium, 31.34 Carbocation, in thiazolium salts, 32 Carbocyanines. see Trimethine thiazolo-cyanines... 

The presence of more complex substituent groups complicates the description of carbene structure. Furthermore, since carbenes are high-energy species, structural entities that would be unrealistic for more stable species must be considered. As an example, one set of MO calculations109 arrives at structure I as a better description of carbomethoxycarbene than the conventional structure J. 

There are a number of ways of generating carbenes that will be discussed shortly. In some cases, the reactions involve complexes or precursors of carbenes rather than the carbene per se. For example, carbenes can be generated by a-elimination reactions. Under some circumstances the question arises as to whether the carbene has a finite lifetime, and in some cases a completely free carbene structure is never attained. 

Bettinger, H. F., Schleyer, P. v. R., Schreiner, P. R., Schaefer, III, H. F., 1997, Computational Analyses of Prototype Carbene Structures and Reactions in Modem Electronic Structure Theory and Applications in Organic Chemistry, Davidson, E. R. (ed.), World Scientific, Singapore. 

In a related DFT study, the hypothetical zinc carbene Cff2ZnCl2 was compared to its carbenoid isomer, ClCH2ZnCl, and the latter structure was shown to be 107.5 kj mol 1 more stable than the former. The zinc carbene structure, by contrast, is only a transition state, which connects two equivalent carbenoids.96... 

The pyridine ylide method depends on the effective trapping of the carbene by pyridine. At high pyridine concentrations every carbene produced by the laser pulse will be trapped as ylide, and the ylide s absorbance (Ay) will saturate or reach a plateau (A °). The magnitude of A ° will vary with carbene structure it will decrease with both the increasing ease of carbene rearrangement and the intervention of RIES during carbene generation.3... 

Carbenes, Structure of (Qoss) sp -sp Carbon-Carbon Single Bonds, Rotational Isomerism about 3 193... 

The intermediate produced by loss of nitrogen from a l.ff-triazole can be written as an imino-carbene, as a zwitterion, or as a diradical. Subsequent reactions of the intermediate which have been observed (Scheme 57) include (a) photochemical WoUf rearrangement (suggesting that the intermediate may have a singlet carbene structure) ... 

Triplet Carbene Structure and ZFS Parameters. The ZFS parameters are thus shown to provide information on the molecular and electronic structures of triplet carbenes. We will see next how the parameters change systematically by examining a series of triplet carbenes. 

Carbene fluorescence in solution is usually red shifted by 25-30 nm with respect to the band position observed in matrix at 77 K. This shift is attributed to emission from nonequilibrated conformations at low temperature. In matrices, the carbene is produced in a locked conformation similar to that for the precursor diazo compound but, in solution, it approaches the thermodynamically favored configuration. This difference has been demonstrated by variable temperature EPR studies of sterically congested carbenes (see Section 3.1.1.3). So, in solution, the equilibrium conformation is reached rapidly and only fluorescence from the relaxed state is observed. In support of this suggestion, the shift for dimesitylcarbene is smaller than for other carbenes, indicating that shifts are smaller when the carbene structure is such that it restricts conformational change. 

Two resonance-contributing structures (3a and 3b), in the formalism of ylide structures, can be used to describe metal carbene intermediates. The highly electrophilic character of those derived from Cu and Rh catalysts suggests that the contribution from the metal-stabilized carbocation 3b is important in the overall evaluation of the reactivities and selectivities of these metal carbene intermediates. Emphasis on the metal carbene structure 3a has led to the subsequently discounted proposal that cyclopropane formation from reactions with alkenes occurs through the intervention of a metallocyclobutane intermediate [18]. The metal-stabilized carbocation structure 3b is consistent with the cyclopropanation mechanism in which LnM dissociates from the carbene as bond-formation occurs between the carbene and the reacting alkene (Eq. 5.4) [7,15]. 

The dihydrothiazol-2-ylidene (4) was generated by photolysis of matrix-isolated thiazol-2-carboxylic acid.12 Calculations suggested that the barrier to isomerization to thiazole is about 42.3 kcal mol 1 and that the carbene resembles the related imidazol-2-ylidene in structure. An ab initio study of hydroxyoxiranone predicted that the decarboxylation of the zwitterion (5) to form hydroxycarbene (6) would be favourable in vacuo but not in water.13 A theoretical study showed that dihalosulfenes (X2C=S02) are best viewed as dihalocarbenc-SO complexes with a carbon-sulfur bond order of approximately zero.14 hi a study directed at the elusive thionformic acid (7), tandem mass spectrometric methods were applied to isomeric ethyl thioformates.15 The results suggest that the radical cations generated have the carbene structure [(HS)C(OH)]+ ... 

Hilf, C. Bosold, F. Harms, K. Lohrenz, J. C. W. Marsch, M. Schimeczek, M. Boche, G. Carbene structure of stable acyl (formyl) anion equivalents. Chem. Ber. 1997, 130,1201-1212. 

The observational techniques used are spectroscopic in all cases. Electronic and vibration-rotation spectroscopy have been used for the simplest structures such as methylene and the halomethylenes the phase in which the carbene is examined does not seem to have much influence on the observed spectra (Bass and Mann, 1962). For more complicated carbenes, structural information has been largely gleaned from EPR spectroscopy using the matrix isolation technique, and this of necessity restricts studies to triplet states. 

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