The mechanisms of the Cope rearrangement in chloro-, bromo-, and
iodobullvalene in solution and
in the solid state were investigated by NMR techniques. The
dominant species in solution, for all three
compounds, are isomers 2 and 3 with nearly equal concentrations (where
the numbers refer to the substituted
carbons in the bullvalene moiety). The kinetics of the
rearrangement processes as studied by 1H and
13C
NMR involve three dominant bond shift rearrangements: interconversion
between isomers 2 and 3, degenerate
rearrangement of isomer 2, and a pseudodegenerate rearrangement of
isomer 3, with isomer 1 serving as an
intermediate. The solid state properties of these compounds were
studied by carbon-13 MAS NMR and the
bromo and iodo derivatives also by X-ray crystallography. Bromo-
and iodobullvalene crystallize entirely as
isomer 2 in the orthorhombic Fdd2 space group. The
molecules in the crystals are orientationally disordered,
and the carbon-13 results show that this disorder is dynamic on the NMR
time scale. Rotor-synchronized
two-dimension exchange spectroscopy, magnetization transfer
experiments, and analysis of dynamic MAS
spectra show that the mechanism of the dynamic disorder involves a
degenerate rearrangement of isomer 2
which results in an effective π-flip of the molecule in the crystal.
The Arrhenius activation parameters for
this process are ΔE
† = 57.1 kJ/mol,
A = 5.2 × 1012 s-1
for bromobullvalene and ΔE
† = 58.5 kJ/mol,
A = 1.8
× 1013 s-1 for iodobullvalene.
Chlorobullvalene is liquid at room temperature (mp 14 °C).
Upon cooling of
this compound in the MAS probe to well below 0 °C, signals due to
both isomer 2 and isomer 3 are observed
in the solid state. It is not known whether the solid so obtained
is a frozen glass, a mixture of crystals due to,
respectively, isomer 2 and isomer 3, or a single type of crystals
consisting of a stoichiometric mixture of both
isomers. Rotor-synchronized two-dimensional exchange measurements
show that the chlorobullvalene isomers
in this solid undergo Cope rearrangement. However, the bond shift
processes involve only a degenerate
rearrangement of isomer 2 and a pseudodegenerate rearrangement of
isomer 3. No cross-peaks corresponding
to interconversion between the two isomers are observed.