Local orbital study of bonding in small rings: Cyclopropane,thiirane, oxirane,and aziridine

The nature of the bonding in the three-membered ring molecules cyclopropane, thiirane, oxirane, and aziridine has been investigated throughab initio FSGO calculations. The direct correspondence between floating spherical Gaussian orbitals and specific chemical bonds has been used to study the degree of “bond bending”. In accord with chemical intuition, it is demonstrated that the C-C ring bond becomes progressively more bent as the bond length is reduced. C-C bonds are found to be more flexible than C-N (O, S) bonds. The sizes and locations of carbon-heteroatom bond orbitals and C-H bond orbitals are also discussed.