molecules Article How do the Hückel and Baird Rules Fade away in Annulenes? Irene Casademont-Reig 1,2 , Eloy Ramos-Cordoba 1,2 , Miquel Torrent-Sucarrat 1,2,3 and Eduard Matito 1,3* 1 Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), 20018 Donostia, Euskadi, Spain;
[email protected] (I.C.-R.);
[email protected] (E.R.-C.);
[email protected] (M.T.-S.) 2 Kimika Fakultatea, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU), 20080 Donostia, Euskadi, Spain 3 IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013 Bilbao, Euskadi, Spain * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +34-943018513 Academic Editors: Diego Andrada and Israel Fernández Received: 20 December 2019; Accepted: 29 January 2020; Published: 7 February 2020 Abstract: Two of the most popular rules to characterize the aromaticity of molecules are those due to Hückel and Baird, which govern the aromaticity of singlet and triplet states. In this work, we study how these rules fade away as the ring structure increases and an optimal overlap between p orbitals is no longer possible due to geometrical restrictions. To this end, we study the lowest-lying singlet and triplet states of neutral annulenes with an even number of carbon atoms between four and eighteen. First of all, we analyze these rules from the Hückel molecular orbital method and, afterwards, we perform a geometry optimization of the annulenes with several density functional approximations in order to analyze the effect that the distortions from planarity produce on the aromaticity of annulenes. Finally, we analyze the performance of three density functional approximations that employ different percentages of Hartree-Fock exchange (B3LYP, CAM-B3LYP and M06-2X) and Hartree-Fock.