Leonie Anna Mueck, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany
Journal of Unsolved Questions, 1, 1, Articles, 7-12, 2011 (Received December 10th, accepted December 27th, published online December 28th 2010)
The discovery of the first neutral compound with chemically bound argon HArF in 2000 was a sensation in noble gas chemistry. If HArF is interpreted as a donor- acceptor complex with H+ as an strong acceptor and F? as a donor fragment the question arises if light noble gases helium, neon and argon could also form donor- acceptor complexes with common Lewis acids and bases like AlF3 and NH3. A covalent interaction between a Lewis acid, a Lewis base and a noble gas could be achieved by spatially dividing the donor and acceptor fragment thus incorporating the donor-acceptor complex into a cage-like structure. Due to the small polarizability of the light noble gases the Lewis acidity and basicity of the employed donor and acceptor must be extremely high for the noble gas to react with the cage. Novel kinds of organic donors and acceptors were designed to fullfill these criteria. These novel donors and acceptors were included in organic cages that fix geometrical conditions to be most favourable for the formation of complexes with noble gases. Among the many considered cage-types were the particularly aesthetic egg-shaped fullerene-type cages and dragon-shaped cages. Despite their beauty and their conceptual originality, they did not meet the requirements of yielding a negative reaction energy with light noble gases but they may be useful for other purposes, e. g. as hosts for hydrogen molecules.
Read more: [download id=”12″]
Supporting information: [download id=”14″]
Keywords: Noble Gases, Donor-Acceptor Complexes, Computational Chemistry