Hypercubane

Hypercubane is a hypothetical polycyclic hydrocarbon with the chemical formula C₄₀H₂₄. It is a molecular analog of the four-dimensional hypercube or tesseract. Hypercubane possesses an unconventional geometry of the carbon framework. It has O_h symmetry like classic cubane C₈H₈ and is characterized by double-shell architecture: C₈ cubic core is located inside the high-symmetry carbon cage.

History

Hypercubane was first proposed in 2014 by Pichierri in the frame of density functional theory.^[1] The initial model of hypercubane was constructed from octamethylcubane by removing unnecessary hydrogen atoms and adding the ethylene bridges as well as intercarbon bonds between the sp² and sp³ atoms. To facilitate the future hypercubane spectroscopic identification chemical shifts for both ¹³C and ¹H NMR-active nuclei have been calculated by Pichierri.^[1] Two years later, in 2016, studying the pyrolysis of hypercubane by means of tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations, Maslov and Katin demonstrated that hypercubane possessed high thermal stability comparable with the classic cubane C₈H₈.^[2] It was shown that hypercubane lifetime at room temperature tended to infinity. Therefore, it can be assumed that hypercubane is a kinetically stable molecular system. Among the possible hypercubane decomposition products at high temperatures (more than 1000 K) one can observe polycyclic airscrew-like hydrocarbon C₃₄H₁₈ based on three combined graphene fragments passivated by hydrogen atoms and three isolated acetylene molecules.^[2]

Synthesis

To date, there has been no method describing the synthesis of hypercubane.

See also

• Cubane

References