Relating the molecular topology and local geometry: Haddon's pyramidalization angle and the Gaussian curvature

Haddon's POAV2 vs POAV theory for non-planar molecules

In this note, we give a self-contained presentation of the POAV2 theory developed by Haddon to study the alignment of π-orbitals along a non-planar molecule. The classical POAV theory is purely geometric instead of the POAV2 which includes more physics in the computations. We compare the results obtained from the POAV2 and POAV theory. We prove that the difference between the two quantities is in most of the cases negligible. As a consequence, the POAV theory is sufficient for most of the purposes concerning the description of the local π-system of a molecule.

BenzAI: A Program to Design Benzenoids with Defined Properties Using Constraint Programming

The BenzAI program can automatically generate benzenoids with defined structural constraints, like the number of hexagons, the number of carbon and/or hydrogen atoms, the existence of symmetries, the number of Kekulé structures, their diameter, or more elaborate criteria like their irregularity. BenzAI allows both automatic generation and manual building of benzenoids including or excluding defined patterns. For all benzenoids with less than 10 rings, it can extract IR spectra from a database that we generated. It computes local aromaticity for closed-shell and monoradical species using circuit-based algorithms. We present practical examples of what can be done with BenzAI for a diversity of cases.

Methodological Investigation for Hydrogen Addition to Small Cage Carbon Fullerenes

Hydrogenated small fullerenes (Cn, n < 60) are of interest as potential astrochemical species, and as intermediates in hydrogen-catalysed fullerene growth. However, the computational identification of key stable species is difficult due to the vast configurationally space of structures. In this study, we explored routes to predict stable hydrogenated small fullerenes. We showed that neither local fullerene geometry nor local electronic structure analysis was able to correctly predict subsequent low-energy hydrogenation sites, and sequential stable addition searches also sometimes failed to identify most stable hydrogenated fullerene isomers. Of the empirical and semi-empirical methods tested, GFN2-xTB consistently gave highly accurate energy correlations (r > 0.99) to full DFT-LDA calculations at a fraction of the computational cost. This allowed identification of the most stable hydrogenated fullerenes up to 4H for four fullerenes, namely two isomers of C28 and C40, via “brute force” systematic testing of all symmetry-inequivalent combinations. The approach shows promise for wider systematic studies of smaller hydrogenated fullerenes.