Seeking Extremes in Molecular Design: To What Extent May Two “Non-Bonded” Hydrogen Atoms be Squeezed in a Hydrocarbon?

Firouzi, R.; Shahbazian, S. ChemPhysChem 2016, 17, 51-54
Contributed by Steven Bachrach
Reposted from Computational Organic Chemistry with permission

Setting the record for the shortest non-bonded H^…H contact has become an active contest. Following on the report of a contact distance of only 1.47 Å that I blogged about here, Firouzi and Shahbazian propose a series of related cage molecules with C-H bonds pointed into their interior.¹ The compounds were optimized with a variety of computational methods, and many of them have H^…H distances well below that of the previous record. The shortest distance is found in 1, shown in Figure 1. The H^…H distance in 1 is predicted to be less than 1.2 Å with a variety of density functionals and moderate basis sets.

1

Figure 1. Optimized geometry of 1 at ωB97X-D/cc-pVDZ.

References

(1) Firouzi, R.; Shahbazian, S. "Seeking Extremes in Molecular Design: To What Extent May Two “Non-Bonded” Hydrogen Atoms be Squeezed in a Hydrocarbon?," ChemPhysChem 2016, 17, 51-54, DOI:10.1002/cphc.201501002.

InChIs

1: InChI=1S/C41H44/c1-7-13-25-17-9-3-40-5-11-19(35(17)40)27-15-8-2-39(1,33(13)15)34-14(7)26-18-10-4-41-6-12-20(36(18)41)28(16(8)34)32(27)30-23(11)37(40)21(9)29(31(25)26)22(10)38(41)24(12)30/h7-38H,1-6H2
InChIKey=DMWSEJFKSWCSLI-UHFFFAOYSA-N

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