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Updated: May 12, 2026

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Isolating Free Carbenes, their Mixed Dimers and Organic Radicals
Published on: April 19, 2019
Structure of the benzene dimer--governed by dynamics
Melanie Schnell1, Undine Erlekam, P R Bunker
1Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany. melanie.schnell@asg.mpg.de
Angewandte Chemie (International Ed. in English)
|April 17, 2013
Summary
No abstract available in PubMed .
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According to the molecular orbital (MO) model, benzene has a planar structure with a regular hexagon of six sp2 hybridized carbons. As shown in Figure 1, each carbon is bonded to three other atoms with C–C–C and H–C–C bond angles of 120°. The C–H bond length is 109 pm, and the C–C bond length is 139 pm which is midway between the single bond length of sp3 hybridized carbons (154 pm) and sp2 hybridized carbons (133 pm).
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Simple unsubstituted benzene has six aromatic protons, all chemically equivalent. Therefore, benzene exhibits only a singlet peak at δ 7.3 ppm in the 1H NMR spectrum. The observed shift is far downfield because the aromatic ring current strongly deshields the protons. Any substitution on the benzene ring makes the aromatic protons nonequivalent, and the protons split each other. The peak is, therefore, no longer a singlet and the splitting pattern and their associated coupling constants depend...
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