Tetrahedrane

I came across this very interesting hydrocarbon a couple of weeks back. It's called a platonic hydrocarbon; not the platonic of platonic relationships that of platonic solids of the diamond and methane fame :).

 A platonic solid is quite symmetric like a cube,;the loose definition being that the number or faces intersecting at each vertex is the same and each face has the same shape and proportions like square faces of a cube. Time for the first look !

Looks very simple doesn't it ? Now you would be wondering if you have seen this somewhere ? If someone had told you that x or y was made with tetrahedrane and in a weak moment you forgot ? Don't worry ;) No one has seen this because it hasn't been made yet. Yes, this simple molecule has been eluding people in lab coats and goggles for quite some time. The reasons for this are quite interesting.

The simple answer is that the molecule has angle strain, and while you're at it, truckloads and truckloads of it. We tend to think of angle strain as something you get when you force something out of the angle it is comfortable with (whatever that is). Kind of the like the restoring force you feel if you have ever tried bending a spoon into a circle and you aren't Uri Geller (if you are, I really liked your theory about the iPhone bending :P ) and this is more or less true.

For our dear buddy carbon, one of the common angle that it is comfortable with is the infamous tetrahedral angle, approximately 109.5 degrees. By the angle that it is comfortable with, I mean the angle between chemical bonds (the grey and white lines in the picture) that would minimize the energy of all the atoms bonded to the carbon and the carbon itself (Explaining what this energy will take me quite some time!). In tetrahedrane, carbon is badly forced out of this angle and it isn't very happy there since the energy is far greater than what it would be ideally. So it reacts as soon as it is formed and would have watched with amusement  many people in lab coats pull out their hair had it been alive !

But that isn't all. Pulling out hair isn't the only thing we have been doing. We have made something called a derivative of tetrahedrane, which is stable due to neat little trick which will be the topic of the next post (probably !). A derivative is what it sounds like, something derived from a molecule by replacing a set of atoms/atom with another set/kind.

P.S Tetrahedrane : A slightly technical but amazingly written blog post on tetrahedrane. Now I'm having second thoughts about writing the next part :)