Stabilization of anti-aromatic and strained five-membered rings with a transition metal

1981年诺贝尔化学奖获得者、美国康奈尔大学RoaldHoffmann教授评价该项工作说：'The　paper is an excellent one--it's　quite a mazing that the parent Os　system,molecule 1,chooses to give the osmapentalyne'。德国化学家Uwe Rosenthal教授等在同期《自然—化学》杂志的《News and Views》栏目以《Breaking the rules》为题撰文评述了这一研究成果。全文地址：http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nchem.1702.pdfAnti-aromatic compounds, as well as small cyclic alkynes or carbynes, are particularly challenging synthetic goals. The combination of their destabilizing features hinders attempts to prepare molecules such as pentalyne, an 8π-electron anti-aromatic bicycle with extremely high ring strain. Here we describe the facile synthesis of osmapentalyne derivatives that are thermally viable, despite containing the smallest angles observed so far at a carbyne carbon. The compounds are characterized using X-ray crystallography, and their computed energies and magnetic properties reveal aromatic character. Hence, the incorporation of the osmium centre not only reduces the ring strain of the parent pentalyne, but also converts its Hückel anti-aromaticity into Craig-type Möbius aromaticity in the metallapentalynes. The concept of aromaticity is thus extended to five-membered rings containing a metal–carbon triple bond. Moreover, these metal–aromatic compounds exhibit unusual optical effects such as near-infrared photoluminescence with particularly large Stokes shifts, long lifetimes and aggregation enhancement