Synthesis of 3,7-diiodo-2,6-di(thiophen-2-yl)benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']difurans: functional building blocks for the design of new conjugated polymers.

3,7-Diiodo-2,6-di(thiophen-2-yl)benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']difurans are efficiently prepared by an iodine-promoted double cyclization. This new heterocyclic core is readily modified by the attachment of alkyl chains for improved solubility. The use of these compounds for the synthesis of new conjugated polymers is also reported.

Computational strategies for reactions of aggregated and solvated organolithium carbenoids.

This study explores the degree to which GGA, meta-GGA, hybrid GGA, and hybrid meta-GGA functionals of density functional theory (DFT), when used with the 6-31+G(d) basis set, are able to reproduce the MP2/6-31+G(d) structures and energetics of the species involved in the reactions of halomethyllithium carbenoids with ethylene. While many popular DFT functionals have been parametrized and/or benchmarked using various databases, the scarcity of experimental structural and energetic information for organolithium compounds has resulted in their exclusion from these training and test sets. In this work, we first establish a set of practical benchmark reaction energetics against which the performance of DFT methods for larger molecules can be compared.