Concertedness in Pericyclic Reactivity

Although such an understanding of the reaction mechanism is in principle applied in the theory of pericyclic reactions, the above general picture is in this case slightly complicated by the specific (introduced in the course of historical development) classification of reaction mechanisms in terms of concertedness and/or nonconcertedness. Concerted reactions are intuitively understood as those reactions for which the scission of old bonds and the formation of the new ones is synchronised, whereas for nonconcerted reactions the above bond exchange processes are completely asynchronised. Moreover, since the above asynchronicity is also intuitively expected to induce the stepwise nature of the process, the nonconcertedness is frequently believed to require the presence of intermediates, whereas the concerted reactions are believed to proceed in one elementary step. 

Although such a definition is seemingly quite clear and unique, the practical exploitation of the above criterion is complicated by the fact that the scission and formation of bonds is a microscopic process, inaccessible to direct experimental observation. This, of course, suggests the necessity of searching other, more easily exploitable, criteria of concert. One such criterion is the remarkable stereospecificity accompanying the formation of products in allowed pericyclic reactions [60,61]. The fact that the origin of the synchronisation in the process of scission and the formation of the bonds was always intuitively related to a certain energetic stabilisation led to another widespread opinion that all allowed reactions are automatically concerted. On the other hand nonconcertedness, advocated by frequently observed stereo-randomization [60] was practically always expected in forbidden reactions. 

The continuing accumulation of experimental material made it, however, still more apparent that the above criteria, both kinetic and stereochemical [61-64], cannot be regarded as absolute [65], since there are probably both concerted reactions which are forbidden as well as nonconcerted ones which are allowed. An example of the first type of reaction is some 2 + 2 retro-cycloadditions on sterically strained systems [62,66] the second type of processes is then represented by the so-called multibond reactions [67]. This, of course, stimulates to formulate a new and more universal criterion of concertedness as well as a deeper understanding of the very concept of concertedness. 

The basic idea of this technique can be best demonstrated by reactions whose is governed by the variation of two nuclear coordinates Qt and Q2, representing, 

Between these two idealised extremes there then exists a practically continuous scale of cases corresponding to the majority of real situations, where the asynchronisation in the formation of bonds is only partial. Since the degree of this asynchronisation is given by the detailed form of the corresponding line, it is apparent that the extent of the deviations from the ideally synchronous diagonal line or the closeness of the approach to the ideally nonconcerted two-step line provides a simple means of characterising the concertedness and/or non-concertedness of the reaction. In spite of its conceptual simplicity, the above 

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