Methyl radical, electron affinity

Rodriquez, C. R, Sirois, S., and Hopkinson, A. C. "Effect of Multiple Halide Substituents on the Acidity of Methanes and Methyl Radicals. Electron Affinities of Chloro and Fluoromethyl Radicals."... 

Specific Electron Capture. It is now customary to use solvents such as methanol (usually CD3OD) or methyl tetrahydrofuran (MTHF) as solvents if electron-capture by AB is required. These solvents form good glasses at 77 K, and for sufficiently dilute solutions of the substrate, AB, electron ejection occurs overwhelmingly from solvent molecules, so that AB+ centres are not formed. Electrons are fairly mobile, and hence AB radicals are formed provided AB has, effectively, a positive electron affinity. The hole centres, such as CD30D+, are not mobile because proton transfer to surrounding solvent molecules occurs rapidly at all temperatures. 

Szwarc (99) found a great affinity for methyl radicals in carbon black. Donnet and co-workers [58, 100, 101) determined the concentration of free radicals on carbon black surfaces by the fixation of the radicals of isobutyronitrile, 3,5-dichlorobenzoyl peroxide, and lauroyl peroxide. The number of radicals bound by the surface coincided satisfactorily with the number of unpaired electrons determined by e.s.r. 

The difference in the electron affinity between light and heavy isotopic isomers is, in other words, the difference in the stability of their anion-radicals. Such a difference gives a valuable tool for use in probing the chemistry of anion-radicals. The difference in the stability of the ring-deuterated and ring-nondeuterated arene anion-radicals has been employed to examine the transition states for the one-electron-promoted cleavage of naphthyl methyl phenyl ether and naphthyl benzyl ether (Guthrie and Shi 1990). In this reaction, the potassium salt of fluoranthene anion-radical was an electron donor ... 

In many cases, homopolymerization can be initiated by the anion-radicals of the monomers themselves. Of course, such monomers must have pronounced electron affinity (EA) and be stabilized by delocalization of an unpaired electron. Typical examples are represented by the anion-radicals of 1,1-dicyanoethylene (EA = 1.36 eV) and methyl or ethyl 2-cyanoacrylates (EA = 1.08 eV). In all of these anion-radicals, an unpaired electron is primarily localized on C atom of the CH2 segment and characterized by appreciable resonance stabilization (Brinkmann et al. 2002). These anion-radicals are nucleophilic and attack the neutral monomers to initiate polymerization. 

The polar effect was at first invoked to explain various directive effects observed in aliphatic systems. Methyl radicals attack propionic acid preferentially at the a-position, ka/kp = 7.8 (per hydrogen), whereas chlorine " prefers to attack at the /3-position, ka/kp = 0.03 (per hydrogen). In an investigation of f-butyl derivatives, a semiquanti-tative relationship was observed between the relative reactivity and the polar effect of the substituents, as evidenced by the pK, of the corresponding acid. In the case of meta- and / ara-substituted toluenes, it has been observed that a very small directive effect exists for some atoms or radicals. When treated by the Hammett relation it is observed that p = —0.1 for H , CeHs , P-CH3C6H4 and CHs . On the contrary, numerous radicals with an appreciable electron affinity show a pronounced polar effect in the reaction with the toluenes. Compilation of Hammett reaction constants and the type of substituent... 

A very useful thermodynamic cycle links three important physical properties homolytic bond dissociation energies (BDE), electron affinities (EA), and acidities. It has been used in the gas phase and solution to determine, sometimes with high accuracy, carbon acidities (Scheme 3.6). " For example, the BDE of methane has been established as 104.9 0.1 kcahmol " " and the EA of the methyl radical, 1.8 0.7 kcal/mol, has been determined with high accuracy by photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) on the methyl anion (i.e., electron binding energy measurements). Of course, the ionization potential of the hydrogen atom is well established, 313.6 kcal/ mol, and as a result, a gas-phase acidity (A//acid) of 416.7 0.7 kcal/mol has been... 

The rate of the reaction of methyl radicals with 03 has been studied from 243 to 384 K by monitoring the decay of methyl in the presence of excess 03 [99], With the temperature dependence of the rate constant it was estimated that less than 1% of the methyl radicals in the stratosphere react with ozone. The reactions of a series of alkyl radicals (CH3, C2HS, n-C3H7, i -C3H7, and t-C4H9) with ozone were investigated at 298 K [100]. The rate coefficients were found to correlate with the difference between the ionization potential of each radical, and the electron affinity of 03. 

In these calculations, the electron affinity of the methyl radical has been taken1 as 27 kcal.mole-1. The other enthalpy terms are all well-known quantities the enthalpies of hydration of individual ions have been assigned as done by Valis ev (see ref. 2) and the enthalpy of hydration of the gaseous methyl anion has been taken as that of the bromide ion. It can be seen from Table 1 that not only is the formation of the methyl anion energetically very unfavoured in the gas phase, but it is also endothermic to the extent of 54 kcal.mole-1 in aqueous solution. A check on this final result can be made by consideration of the standard entropy change for the reaction... 

In recent years, direct, time-resolved methods have been extensively employed to obtain absolute kinetic data for a wide variety of alkyl radical reactions in the liquid phase, and there is presently a considerable body of data available for alkene addition reactions of a wide variety of radical types [104]. For example, rates of alkene addition reactions of the nucleophilic ferf-butyl radical (with its high-lying SOMO) have been found to correlate with alkene electron affinities (EAs), which provide a measure of the alkene s LUMO energies [105,106]. The data indicate that the reactivity of such nucleophilic radicals is best understood as deriving from a dominant SOMO-LUMO interaction, leading to charge transfer interactions which stabilize the early transition state and lower both the enthalpic and entropic barriers to reaction, with consequent rate increase. A similar recent study of the methyl radical indicated that it also had nucleophilic character, but its nucleophilic behavior is weaker than that expressed by other alkyl radicals [107]. 

The ionization potentials (IP), electron affinities (EA), and absolute electronegativities of fluoroalkyl radicals are useful in order to elucidate the nucleophilic and electrophilic reactivities of the fluoroalkyl radicals. Table 1.36 summarizes available IP and EA data, indicating that (1) all of the a-fluoromethyl radicals have lower IPs than methyl radicals in spite of the strong inductive effect of the fluorine atom, and (2) trifluoromethyl and pentafluoroethyl radicals are, of course, more electrophilic than methyl and ethyl radicals because of their higher values of EA [30]. The former result may arise from the electron-donating conjugation of lone-pair electrons on the fluorine atom, and the latter is due to the strong inductive effect of the fluorine atom. 

The above examples show the complexity of the systems involving radical-anions derived from compounds of higher electron-affinity. It is not surprising, therefore, that benzophenone ketyl and other similar compounds do not initiate styrene polymerization, although they initiate polymerization of acrylonitrile or methyl-methacrylate. On the other hand, the monomeric dianions of benzophenone initiate polymerization of styrene as well as of other monomers, but not of vinyl chloride or acetate. Mechanisms of these initations were not investigated and presumably are complex. 

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