Hydrogen–Hydrogen Bonding: A Stabilizing Interaction in Molecules and Crystals

Abstract

Bond paths linking two bonded hydrogen atoms that bear identical or similar charges are found between the ortho‐hydrogen atoms in planar biphenyl, between the hydrogen atoms bonded to the C1–C4 carbon atoms in phenanthrene and other angular polybenzenoids, and between the methyl hydrogen atoms in the cyclobutadiene, tetrahedrane and indacene molecules corseted with tertiary‐tetra‐butyl groups. It is shown that each such H–H interaction, rather than denoting the presence of “nonbonded steric repulsions”, makes a stabilizing contribution of up to 10 kcal mol⁻¹ to the energy of the molecule in which it occurs. The quantum theory of atoms in molecules—the physics of an open system—demonstrates that while the approach of two bonded hydrogen atoms to a separation less than the sum of their van der Waals radii does result in an increase in the repulsive contributions to their energies, these changes are dominated by an increase in the magnitude of the attractive interaction of the protons with the electron density distribution, and the net result is a stabilizing change in the energy. The surface virial that determines the contribution to the total energy decrease resulting from the formation of the H–H interatomic surface is shown to account for the resulting stability. It is pointed out that H–H interactions must be ubiquitous, their stabilization energies contributing to the sublimation energies of hydrocarbon molecular crystals, as well as solid hydrogen. H–H bonding is shown to be distinct from “dihydrogen bonding”, a form of hydrogen bonding with a hydridic hydrogen in the role of the base atom.