The azaacepentalenide anion: a new aromatic, bowl-shaped heterocycle

Neutral hydrocarbons like cyclopentadiene with an odd number of carbon atoms and one intervening CH2 group in the ring are not aromatic. Cyclopentadiene with 4 π electrons does not satisfy the 4n + 2 π electron rule. Additionally, the intervening CH2 group is sp3 hybridized and lacks a vacant p orbital, thereby interrupting the overlap of p orbitals in a continuous manner and preventing the delocalization of π electrons throughout the ring.
Due to the absence of continuous overlap of p...

Heterocyclic aromatic compounds are cyclic compounds that are aromatic and have one or more heteroatoms—atoms other than carbon, in the ring. Depending upon the number of atoms present in the ring, they can be either five or six-membered. Examples of five-membered heterocyclic aromatic compounds include pyrrole, furan, thiophene, and imidazole. Pyrrole consists of one nitrogen atom having one lone pair of electrons. Furan and thiophene have one oxygen and one sulfur heteroatom, respectively.

Treating arylamines with nitrous acid gives aryldiazonium salts that are effective substrates in nucleophilic aromatic substitution reactions. The diazonio group in these salts can be easily displaced by different nucleophiles, yielding a wide variety of substituted benzenes. The leaving group departs as nitrogen gas, and this easy elimination is the driving force for the substitution reaction.
In the Sandmeyer reaction, for example, the diazonio group is replaced by a chloro, bromo, or cyano...

The reaction of weakly electrophilic aryldiazonium (also called arenediazonium) salts with highly activated aromatic compounds leads to the formation of products with an —N=N— link, called an azo linkage. This reaction, presented in Figure 1, is known as diazo coupling and occurs without the loss of the nitrogen atoms of the aryldiazonium salt. Highly activated aromatic compounds such as phenols or arylamines favor the diazo coupling reaction. The coupling generally occurs at the para position.

The simplest aromatic amine is phenylamine, which contains an –NH2 functionality directly attached to an aromatic ring. The name aniline is designated for this skeleton. As shown in Figure 1, the common names of the functionalized anilines involve prefixes ortho-, meta-, and para- to indicate the substitution position. Different functionalized aniline derivatives also have notable trivial names.

Cycloheptatriene is a neutral monocyclic unsaturated hydrocarbon that consists of an odd number of carbon atoms and an intervening sp3 carbon in the ring. The three double bonds in the ring correspond to 6 π electrons, which is a Huckel number, and therefore satisfies the criteria of 4n + 2 π electrons. However, the intervening sp3 carbon disrupts the continuous overlap of p orbitals. As a result, cycloheptatriene is not aromatic.
Removing one hydrogen from the intervening CH2 group with both...