organic chemistry. It does not look like much, but this small little molecule brought us ferrocene, fluxional NMR, aromatic anions and valley-ridge inflexion points. You might not have heard of this last one, but in fact I mentioned the phenomenon in my post on nitrosobenzene. As for being at a crossroads, more like a Y-junction. Let me explain why.
Cyclopentadiene is made by thermal cracking of its dimer, and on standing it slowly reverts to this species. At its simplest, this dimerisation can be described as a π2s + π4s pericyclic cycloaddition, one of the monomers being the π2s and the other the π4s. Two new bonds are formed; one of these is shown in black, but the other can be either the one in red (which makes the π4s the monomer on the right) or the one in blue (in which case the π4s comes from the molecule on the left). How do these two partners decide which role each is to play? Well, the short answer is that, initially at least, they do not! The reaction proceeds very asynchronously, forming at first only the black bond. Eventually, they cannot take the suspense any longer, and when the point indicated with a green dot is reached, they finally have to take a decision. Up to the green dot, the potential energy surface has followed along a valley ridge, and the green decision point is known as the bifurcation point; one with an equal probability of the reaction giving either the top dimer or the bottom dimer.
If you are sharp-eyed you may notice a methyl group has been added to one of the monomers; this was done to balance the decision very slightly in favour of one route down from the green point over the other. Otherwise, the IRC pathway often just stops at the green point, unable to decide which way to take.
You can see this oddity reflected in the gradient norm of the IRC, which at IRC -1.5 suddenly acquires a new feature, the formation of the second bond. The lesson here is to remember that bonds do not have to form at the same time, they can instead follow, one after the other.
The two different dimers that result from the bifurcation are not in fact identical, they are mirror images (diastereomers because of the methyl group) of each other. They can in turn be inter-converted by a Cope rearrangement, a [3,3] sigmatropic reaction. The transition state for this process is none other than the green point reached earlier. It is indeed a transition state at a crossroads, connecting two quite different reactions, the Diels-Alder cycloaddition and the [3,3] Cope enantiomerisation of the dimer product. Such a reaction has been christened a bispericyclic reaction, one truly at a Y-junction.
Who would have thought that such an un-pretentious molecule could teach us so much. You can see this and many other examples of pericylic reactions in my course on the topic, available on an iPad by clicking here.
Postscript: I have managed to run a full IRC on the system without the methyl perturbation.
The bifurcation point (green dot) is clearly seen in the following two plots at a value of IRC +1.0
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