The authors of paper #2 reported on the behavior of a chiral dienophile in Diels-Alder reactions. For reasons that I will discuss on another day, they wanted to conduct their reactions at the lowest possible temperature and so a Lewis acid catalyst was required. They investigated several catalysts based on B and Al compounds and this raised some questions during our discussion last Monday.
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Today’s class presented two formalisms that organic chemists use for connecting rates, rate constants, and the shapes of PE surfaces:
- Arrhenius equation (old-school but still useful and still widely used; go here for more background on collisions & kinetics)
- transition state theory (more obvious connection to thermodynamic quantities, but web pages say this is not useful when barriers get very small)
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