Formation.

Because carbenes are molecules with high energy content, they must be made from high-energy precursors, or extra energy must be provided from external sources. Chemical transformations induced by light, so-called photochemical reactions, often are used to prepare carbenes, because the energy of the absorbed light is taken into the high-energy structures. Organic compounds containing a diazo group (two nitrogen atoms joined to one another and to a carbon atom by a double bond) are the most frequently used precursors of carbenes. The molecular structure of diazo compounds is represented by the generalized formula

in which R and R′ represent two organic groups, which may be the same or different. On either photolysis or pyrolysis (treatment with light or heat, respectively), diazo compounds cleave to yield the corresponding carbene and a free molecule of nitrogen gas. Diazirins, which are ring, or cyclic, compounds, with a structure similar to that of the diazo compounds, undergo the same cleavage reaction and are frequently used as precursors of carbenes. The production of a carbene from a diazo compound occurs as shown below:

When the photolysis of diazo compounds is carried out at very low temperature in an unreactive solid medium, it is often possible to prevent the resulting carbene from undergoing further reaction. Measurable amounts of the carbene may persist, therefore, in the solid medium, or matrix, for a long time. For example, methylene, the most reactive carbene of all, has been generated in a crystalline matrix of the inert gas xenon (cooled to the boiling point of helium) in which it persisted long enough to be studied. Many other carbenes have been produced by similar matrix isolation techniques.

The photolytic decomposition of certain ketenes, substances the molecules of which contain two carbon atoms and an oxygen atom joined by double bonds,

gives carbon monoxide and carbenes, as shown in the following equation:

Under certain circumstances, cyclopropanes, the molecules of which contain three-membered carbon rings, can serve as carbene precursors in photochemical reactions. For example, 1,1,2,2,-tetraphenylcyclopropane is converted to diphenylcarbene by the reaction

The formation of carbenes by way of electrically charged, or ionic, intermediates is exemplified by the reaction of chloroform with a strong base, potassium tert-butoxide. In the first step of this reaction, a proton or hydrogen ion (H⁺) is removed from the chloroform molecule in a normal acid–base reaction. The resulting potassium trichloromethide then loses potassium chloride to give dichlorocarbene. Other haloforms, compounds conforming to the formula HCX₃, in which X equals an atom of chlorine, bromine, or iodine, react in an equivalent way to form the corresponding dihalocarbenes.

Reactions.

Methylene is one of the most reactive molecules known and there are few organic compounds able to resist attack by this substance. The reactivity of carbenes is somewhat reduced when stabilization results from the phenomenon known as resonance, which is said to occur when alternate electronic structures (called resonance forms) can be written for a single molecular type. The actual state of the molecule is then thought to include characteristics of all the forms and to be more stable than any of them individually. Difluorocarbene and methoxycarbene, for example, are much less reactive than methylene, presumably because the resonance forms shown in the formulas below contribute to internal stabilization.

In these representations, the various resonance forms of a single hybrid structure are connected by double-headed arrows, and the plus and minus signs indicate positive and negative charges produced by shifts of electrons.

The various chemical reactions that carbenes undergo can be classified as either intramolecular or intermolecular reactions. Intramolecular reactions, or rearrangements, involve only the carbene itself and include no other outside substances; if structurally possible, they lead to stable molecules in which the carbon atom is in its normal, or tetravalent, state. An example of an intramolecular reaction is the rearrangement of methylcarbene to ethylene, in which a hydrogen atom undergoes a shift from one carbon atom to the next:

Such an intramolecular rearrangement, of course, is not possible for carbenes composed of only three atoms, such as methylene itself or the halomethylenes.

Intermolecular reactions are those involving two or more separate molecules. Three important classes of intermolecular reaction of carbenes are known: dimerization, addition, and insertion reactions. Dimerization of carbenes—combination of two molecules of the carbene—gives olefins, the molecular formulas of which are exactly twice that of the carbene. An example is the formation of tetramethoxyethylene from dimethoxycarbene.

The addition of carbenes to olefins and acetylenes is a very useful reaction because it constitutes a simple way to synthesize cyclopropanes and cyclopropenes having a great variety of structures. Intramolecular versions of this type of addition reaction are also possible, as shown by the cyclization of allylcarbene generated from the corresponding diazo compound. The resulting bicyclobutane—an unusual compound, which contains a ring system with considerable strain resulting from abnormal angles between bonds—demonstrates the value of carbene reactions for the synthesis compounds difficult to obtain by other methods.

Analytical and physical study.

Because carbenes occur chiefly as intermediates in the course of chemical reactions, much of their study is conducted by kinetic methods, as the general field of investigation of rates of reaction and the factors that influence them is known. Much of the available information about the structures of carbenes has been obtained by optical spectroscopic methods—that is, by the study of light absorption patterns—which have revealed, for example, the bond lengths and angles in the various carbenes. Electron-spin resonance spectroscopy, the physical method that gives information about the angular momenta of electrons, has been especially useful in differentiating triplet from singlet states.