Archive for April, 2010

WebCite and Jmol

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Since I have gotten into the habit of quoting some of my posts in other contexts, I have started to also archive them using WebCite. One can quote the resulting archive as:

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Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »

Carbobenzene: benzene with a difference

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Some molecules, when you first see them, just intrigue. So it was with carbobenzene, the synthesis of a derivative of which was recently achieved by Remi Chauvin and co-workers (DOI: 10.1002/chem.200601193). Two additional carbon atoms have been inserted into each of the six C-C bonds in benzene.

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Posted in General | 4 Comments »

The conformation of 1,2-difluoroethane

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Here I offer another spin-off from writing a lecture course on conformational analysis. This is the famous example of why 1,2-difluoroethane adopts a gauche rather than antiperiplanar conformation.

The gauche and antiperiplanar conformations of 1,2-difluoroethane

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Posted in Interesting chemistry | 14 Comments »

Conformational analysis of biphenyls: an upside-down view

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

One of the (not a few) pleasures of working in a university is the occasional opportunity that arises to give a new lecture course to students. New is not quite the correct word, since the topic I have acquired is Conformational analysis. The original course at Imperial College was delivered by Derek Barton himself about 50 years ago (for articles written by him on the topic, see DOI 10.1126/science.169.3945.539 or the original 10.1039/QR9561000044), and so I have had an opportunity to see how the topic has evolved since then, and perhaps apply some quantitative quantum mechanical interpretations unavailable to Barton himself.

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Posted in Interesting chemistry | 11 Comments »