A three-step process to facilitate the annulation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

A new efficient three-step process to annulate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has been developed, providing access to PAHs with saturated rings that under current chemical methods would be difficult to produce in an efficient manner. This method relies on a palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction of various brominated PAHs with cyclohexanone to yield α-arylated ketones, which are converted to regiospecific vinyl triflates and cyclized by a palladium-catalyzed intramolecular arene-vinyl triflate coupling to produce PAHs with incorporated saturated rings or "tetrahydroindeno-annulated" PAHs.

Aryl-aryl bond formation by flash vacuum pyrolysis of benzannulated thiopyrans.

In contrast to fully unsaturated 7-membered ring sulfur heterocycles (thiepines), some of which extrude sulfur and give the ring-contracted hydrocarbon even at room temperature in solution, benzannulated thiopyrans (6-membered sulfur heterocycles) require flash vacuum pyrolysis (FVP) conditions in the gas phase at temperatures in the range of 1000-1200 degrees C to promote the corresponding reaction. Thus, FVP of benzo[kl]thioxanthene (1) gives fluoranthene, and naphtho[2,1,8,7-klmn]thioxanthene (6) gives benzo[ghi]fluoranthene (7). FVP of thioxanthone (9) gives fluorenone (10), together with lesser amounts of dibenzo[b,d]thiophene (11), from competing decarbonylation.

Trisannulated benzene derivatives by Acid catalyzed aldol cyclotrimerizations of cyclic ketones. Methodology development and mechanistic insight.

Several factors that contribute to the success of aldol cyclotrimerizations have been clarified as part of an effort to shed light on the inner workings of this century old reaction. The use of 4,7-di-tert-butylacenaphthenone (11) as a mechanistic probe molecule has led to intriguing discoveries about temperature, solvent, and solubility effects. Solvents that are both polarizable and somewhat polar, e.g., o-dichlorobenzene (ODCB), work best for the aromatic ketones examined. Certain Brønsted acids were found to work better than Lewis acids as catalysts for the archetypal aldol cyclotrimerization of indanone (2) in aprotic solvents, and a strong dependence on the pKa of the acid was observed. A standardized protocol, using p-toluenesulfonic acid monohydrate, is shown to work well in a number of test cases.

Ring current effects in crystals. Evidence from 13C chemical shift tensors for intermolecular shielding in 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthene versus 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthylene.

13C chemical shift tensor data from 2D FIREMAT spectra are reported for 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthene and 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthylene. In addition, calculations of the chemical shielding tensors were completed at the B3LYP/6-311G** level of theory. While the experimental tensor data on 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthylene are in agreement with theory and with previous data on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the experimental and theoretical data on 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthene lack agreement. Instead, larger than usual differences are observed between the experimental chemical shift components and the chemical shielding tensor components calculated on a single molecule of 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthene, with a root mean square (rms) error of +/-7.0 ppm. The greatest deviation is concentrated in the component perpendicular to the aromatic plane, with the largest value being a 23 ppm difference between experiment and theory for the 13CH2 carbon delta11 component. These differences are attributed to an intermolecular chemical shift that arises from the graphitelike, stacked arrangement of molecules found in the crystal structure of 4,7-di-t-butylacenaphthene. This conclusion is supported by a calculation on a trimer of molecules, which improves the agreement between experiment and theory for this component by 14 ppm and reduces the overall rms error between experiment and theory to 4.0 ppm. This intermolecular effect may be modeled with the use of nuclei independent chemical shieldings (NICS) calculations and is also observed in the isotropic 1H chemical shift of the CH2 protons as a 4.2 ppm difference between the solution value and the solid-state chemical shift measured via a 13C-1H heteronuclear correlation experiment.