Dissociation of the phenanthroimidazole dimer A highly delocalized radical Gomberg revisited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Results of a calculational study at the B3LYP/6-3/G* level concerning the dimerization of the phenanthroimidazole radical are reported herein. The optimized minimum energies of six dimer structures corresponding to CC, CN, and NN bonding have been obtained. The lowest energy dimer is found to be that resulting from NN bonding (12). However, this does not correspond to an X-ray structure study of the experimentally isolated dimer (13), which reveals CN bonding, as is also deduced from an NMR investigation. The variance between the experimental structure and the calculational lowest energy one is examined on the basis of steric interactions: virtually retained planarity, and hence, full conjugation in the two phenanthroimidazole halves in 12, vs. twisting and lack of coplanarity in the other dimer structures. Importantly, spin density calculations reveal a negligible spin density on the nitrogens, rendering dimer 12 formation through NN bonding highly improbable. A bond dissociation energy of 16.5 kcal/mol (1 cal = 4.184 J) is calculated for the experimental dimer 13, which is by far the lowest CN bond energy recorded so far in the literature. As well, this value is of the same order of magnitude as the calculated CC BDE in hexaphenylethane, which had been postulated by Gomberg in 1900 as the molecule formed on dimerization of the triphenymethyl radical, but so far not observed experimentally. Key words: delocalized radical dimerization, phenanthroimidazole dimer, Gomberg's dimer, X-ray structure, CN bond dissociation energy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".