Indo study of some cyclic carbenes

INDO calculations, with geometry optimization, have been performed on the cyclic carbenes cyclopropenylidene (I) cyclopropylidene (II), and cyclopentadienylidene (III). It is found that all three systems have a singlet ground state and, due to aromaticity, the triplet-singlet energy separations for I and III are particularly large. In addition, for each system, the electronic structure and its influences on geometry and reactivity are discussed.