Stable Tetrabenzo-Chichibabin’s Hydrocarbons: Tunable Ground State and Unusual Transition between Their Closed-Shell and Open-Shell Resonance Forms

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<P>Stable open-shell polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are of fundamental interest due to their unique electronic, optical, and magnetic properties and promising applications in materials sciences. Chichibabin’s hydrocarbon as a classical open-shell PAH has been investigated for a long time. However, most of the studies are complicated by their inherent high reactivity. In this work, two new stable benzannulated Chichibabin’s hydrocarbons <B>1-CS</B> and <B>2-OS</B> were prepared, and their electronic structure and geometry in the ground state were studied by various experiments (steady-state and transient absorption spectra, NMR, electron spin resonance (ESR), superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), FT Raman, X-ray crystallographic etc.) and density function theory (DFT) calculations. <B>1-CS</B> and <B>2-OS</B> exhibited tunable ground states, with a closed-shell quinoidal structure for <B>1-CS</B> and an open-shell biradical form for <B>2-OS</B>. Their corresponding excited-state forms <B>1-OS</B> and <B>2-CS</B> were also chemically approached and showed different decay processes. The biradical <B>1-OS</B> displayed an unusually slow decay to the ground state (<B>1-CS</B>) due to a large energy barrier (95 ± 2.5 kJ/mol) arising from severe steric hindrance during the transition from an orthogonal biradical form to a butterfly-like quinoidal form. The quick transition from the quinoidal <B>2-CS</B> (excited state) to the orthogonal biradicaloid <B>2-OS</B> (ground state) happened during the attempted synthesis of <B>2-CS</B>. Compounds <B>1-CS</B> and <B>2-OS</B> can be oxidized into stable dications by FeCl<SUB>3</SUB> and/or concentrated H<SUB>2</SUB>SO<SUB>4</SUB>. The open-shell <B>2-OS</B> also exhibited a large two-photon absorption (TPA) cross section (760 GM at 1200 nm).</P><P><B>Graphic Abstract</B>
<IMG SRC='http://pubs.acs.org/appl/literatum/publisher/achs/journals/content/jacsat/2012/jacsat.2012.134.issue-35/ja3050579/production/images/medium/ja-2012-050579_0017.gif'></P><P><A href='http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/ja3050579'>ACS Electronic Supporting Info</A></P>