Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog
Author Henry Rzepa
In the previous post, I showed that carbon can act as a hydrogen bond acceptor (of a proton) to form strong hydrogen bond complexes. Which brings me to a conceptual connection: can singlet dicarbon form such a hydrogen bond? Dicarbon can be variously represented as above. The first form shows it as a bis-carbene, with an unbonded lone pair of electrons at each end of a carbon double bond.