Three-electron conical intersections

Three-Electron Conical Intersections of Conjugated Hydrocarbons... 

Although this reaction appears to involve only two electrons, it was shown by Mulder [57] that in fact two jc and two ct elections are required to account for this system. The three possible spin pairings become clear when it is realized that a pair of carbene radicals are formally involved. Figure 14. In practice, the conical intersection defined by the loop in Figme 14 is high-lying, so that often other conical intersections are more important in ethylene photochemistry. Flydrogen-atom shift products are observed [58]. This topic is further detailed in Section VI. 

We illustrate the method for the relatively complex photochemistry of 1,4-cyclohexadiene (CHDN), a molecule that has been extensively studied [60-64]. There are four it electrons in this system. They may be paired in three different ways, leading to the anchors shown in Figure 17. The loop is phase inverting (type i ), as every reaction is phase inverting), and therefore contains a conical intersection Since the products are highly strained, the energy of this conical intersection is expected to be high. Indeed, neither of the two expected products was observed experimentally so far. 

The next simplest loop would contain at least one reaction in which three electron pairs are re-paired. Inspection of the possible combinations of two four-electron reactions and one six-electron reaction starting with CHDN reveals that they all lead to phase preseiwing i p loops that do not contain a conical intersection. It is therefore necessary to examine loops in which one leg results in a two electron-pair exchange, and the other two legs involve three elechon-pair exchanges fip loops). As will be discussed in Section VI, all reported products (except the helicopter-type elimination of H2) can be understood on the basis of four-electron loops. We therefore proceed to discuss the unique helicopter... 

The transformation of ethylene to the carbene requires the re-pairing of three electron pairs. It is a phase-preserving reaction, so that the loop is an ip one. The sp -hybridized carbon atom formed upon H transfer is a chiral center consequently, there are two equivalent loops, and thus conical intersections, leading to two enantiomers. 

THE cvcLOBUTADENE-TETRAHEDRANE SYSTEM. A related reaction is the photoisomerization of cyclobutadiene (CBD). It was found that unsubstituted CBD does not react in an argon matrix upon irradiation, while the tri-butyl substituted derivative forms the corresponding tetrahedrane [86,87]. These results may be understood on the basis of a conical intersection enclosed by the loop shown in Figure 37. The analogy with the butadiene loop (Fig. 13) is obvious. The two CBDs and the biradical shown in the figure are the three anchors in this system. With small substituents, the two lobes containing the lone electrons can be far... 

The spin in quantum mechanics was introduced because experiments indicated that individual particles are not completely identified in terms of their three spatial coordinates [87]. Here we encounter, to some extent, a similar situation A system of items (i.e., distributions of electrons) in a given point in configuration space is usually described in terms of its set of eigenfunctions. This description is incomplete because the existence of conical intersections causes the electronic manifold to be multivalued. For example, in case of two (isolated) conical intersections we may encounter at a given point m configuration space four different sets of eigenfunctions (see Section Vni). 

In case of three conical intersections, we have as many as eight different sets of eigenfunctions, and so on. Thus we have to refer to an additional chai acterization of a given sub-sub-Hilbert space. This characterization is related to the number Nj of conical intersections and the associated possible number of sign flips due to different contours in the relevant region of configuration space, traced by the electronic manifold. 

Figure 18. Contour plots of the potential energy surfaces of the first three electronic states of H2O. The polar plots depict the movement of one H atom around OH with an OH bond length fixed at 1.07 A. Energies are in electron volts relative to the ground electronic state. The X and B states are degenerate at the conical intersection (denoted by (g)) in the (a) H—OH geometry and (b) H—HO geometry. Reprinted fix)m [75] with permission from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

We now proceed to look at three examples from recent work in some depth. In the first example, we wish to illustrate that a knowledge of the VB structure or of the states involved in photophysics and photochemistry rationalize the potential surface topology in an intuitively appealing way. We then proceed to look at an example where the extended hyperline concept has interesting mechanistic implications. Finally, we shall look at an example of how conical intersections can control electron transfer problems. 

Figure 9.29. Three conical intersection surface topologies for electron transfer processes in radical cations (adapted from reference 5).

Han S, Yarkony DR (2003) Nonadiabatic processes involving three electronic states. I. Branch cuts and linked pairs of conical intersections. J Chem Phys 119 5058... 

Matsika S, Yarkony DR (2003) Conical intersections of three electronic states affect the ground state of radical species with little Or no symmetry pyrazolyl. J Am Chem Soc 125 12428... 

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