Chemical Society Reviews Magnetic Criteria of Aromaticity Journal: Chemical Society Reviews Manuscript ID: CS-TRV-02-2015-000114.R2 Article Type: Review Article Date Submitted by the Author: 10-May-2015 Complete List of Authors: Stanger, Amnon; Technion, Chemistry Gershno-Poranne, Renana; Technion, Chemistry Page 1 of 34 Chemical Society Reviews Magnetic Criteria of Aromaticity Renana Gershoni-Poranne [a] and Amnon Stanger* [a] Addresses [a] R. Gershoni-Poranne, Prof. A. Stanger Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and the Lise Meitner-Minerva Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. E-mail:
[email protected] Dedication Dedicated to Prof. Yitzhak Apeloig on the occasion of his 70 th birthday. Introduction Preface: Benzene was discovered in 1825 by Faraday. The determination and understanding of its structure presented a great challenge to scientists: the compound was highly unsaturated, yet did not show any of the typical reactions of unsaturated compounds, e.g., addition of bromine. The first suggestion that the molecule is cyclic is traditionally attributed to Kekulé in his 1865 1 and 1866 2 papers, although some argue that this idea was presented earlier by Josef Loschmidt. 3 In any event, accumulating experimental evidences, mainly experiments that were conducted by Ladenburg and Wroblewsky, indicated that the proposed structure was unsatisfactory, as it did not account for there being only three disubstituted isomers of benzene instead of the expected four. It was only in 1872 that Kekulé suggested oscillating structures, in which synchronous 1,2-shifts of the three double bonds occur very rapidly. 4 It took about six decades until Erich Hückel 5-9 and Linus Pauling 10 introduced their quantum mechanical based MO and VB explanations, respectively, which introduced the concept of delocalization (of bonds and electrons).