Electrostatically tuning radical addition and atom abstraction reactions with distonic radical ions

Although electrostatic catalysis can enhance the kinetics and selectivity of reactions to produce greener synthetic processes, the highly directional nature of electrostatic interactions has limited widespread application. In this study, the influence of oriented electric fields (OEF) on radical addition and atom abstraction reactions are systematically explored with ion-trap mass spectrometry using structurally diverse distonic radical ions that maintain spatially separated charge and radical moieties. When installed on rigid molecular scaffolds, charged functional groups lock the magnitude and orientation of the internal electric field with respect to the radical site, creating an OEF which tunes the reactivity across the set of gas-phase carbon-centred radical reactions. In the first case, OEFs predictably accelerate and decelerate the rate of molecular oxygen addition to substituted phenyl, adamantyl, and cubyl radicals, depending on the polarity of the charged functional group and dipole orientation. In the second case, OEFs modulate competition between chlorine and hydrogen atom abstraction from chloroform based on interactions between charge polarity, dipole orientation, and radical polarizability. Importantly, this means the same charge polarity can induce different changes to reaction selectivity. Quantum chemical calculations of these reactions with DSD-PBEP86-D3(BJ)/aug-cc-pVTZ show correlations between the barrier heights and the experimentally determined reaction kinetics. Field effects are consistent between phenyl and cubyl scaffolds, pointing to through-space rather than through-bond field effects, congruent with computations showing that the same effects can be mimicked by point charges. These results experimentally demonstrate how internal OEFs generated by carefully placed charged functional groups can systematically control radical reactions.