What are the shortest and longest known As-As bonds?

How would you find the answer to this question?
How long did it take you?
How sure are you that your answer is correct?
What would you do to check?
Comments welcome.

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5 Responses to What are the shortest and longest known As-As bonds?

  1. CrystalEye. 10 secs. Fairly sure, though it would be useful to give precalculate the stats (+/- 2 s.d.) on http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye/bondlengths/As-As.svg.
    I would surely explore those structures outside the 95% conf. interval, and see what is different about those. The distribution looks quite unimodel, but given the yet few values, this could be explored.

  2. Another comment… the data for C-C seems bimodel. Though I was expecting more like three distributions: C-C, C=C, C#C, maybe even one for C-arom-C, which distances is somewhere in between C-C and C=C… It would be nice if CrystalEye would split that up for bond type.

  3. pm286 says:

    (1) We are thinking of different ways of presenting this – for example when there are few structures in a bin.
    (2) I think that something has got omitted – there are nearly 1 million bonds in this diagram and I wouldn’t trust it. It would in principle be possible to do something for bond orders though these are often arbitrary.

  4. Nick D says:

    There’s no problem with the C-C plot, it’s just that there are so few triple bonds compared to single and double. If you look very closely there are at least a couple of bins around 1.2 angstroms (e.g. http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye/bondlengths/C-C/1.19-1.2.html). Like you said, something needs to be done to make the smaller bins more noticeable – like plotting the occurences on a logarithmic scale.

  5. pm286 says:

    (4) I was more concerned about the lack of C=C double bonds. But maybe almost all of those are conjugated…

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