Archive for July 21st, 2021

Dimerisation of cyclopropenylidene: what are the correct “curly arrows” for this process?

Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

In another post, a discussion arose about whether it might be possible to trap cyclopropenylidene to form a small molecule with a large dipole moment. Doing so assumes that cyclopropenylidene has a sufficiently long lifetime to so react, before it does so with itself to e.g. dimerise. That dimerisation has an energy profile shown below, with a free energy of activation of 14.4 kcal/mol, so a facile reaction that will indeed compete with reaction with Ph-I+-CC.

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