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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteYes—but not by making a flat silicon copy of benzene. In a 2010 Science paper, chemists reported an intensely green, tricyclic silicon compound with the formula Si6R6, an isomer of the targeted hexasilabenzene. The researchers proposed that its central four-membered ring has an unusual kind of aromaticity, which they called “dismutational aromaticity.”
What the chemists made
Kai Abersfelder, Andrew J. P. White, Henry S. Rzepa and David Scheschkewitz reported the compound in Science on 29 January 2010. It has the formula Si6R6, where R is 2,4,6-triisopropylphenyl, and is an isomer of hexasilabenzene: it contains the same overall formula, but its atoms are connected in a different arrangement. The solid-state structure is tricyclic, with silicon atoms carrying two, one or no substituents outside the ring framework. The authors’ abstract and publication details are indexed by PubMed.
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Contemporary reporting described a chairlike shape and synthesis by coupling cyclotrisilane units bearing bulky substituents. The result is therefore not a six-silicon hexagon that simply reproduces benzene’s shape. Chemical & Engineering News covered the structure and synthesis in February 2010.
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Why call it aromatic?
Aromaticity is an electronic-structure description, not just a label for a ring. In the familiar benzene model, six pi electrons are delocalized around a planar six-carbon ring. For the silicon compound, the authors’ theoretical analysis instead identified cyclic delocalization of six mobile electrons across the central four-membered ring. Those electrons have pi, sigma and non-bonding character in the proposed description.
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The researchers proposed “dismutational aromaticity” for this pattern. Their abstract notes that the solution-state silicon-29 NMR shifts span +125 to −90 ppm, a wide range they associated with an inhomogeneous electron distribution and dismutation of formal oxidation numbers. The proposal is a specific interpretation of this molecule’s electronic structure—not a claim that it behaves just like benzene or that all aromatic systems share one architecture.
What the magnetic evidence adds
A follow-up analysis by Raphael J. F. Berger, Henry S. Rzepa and David Scheschkewitz examined the molecule’s ring currents, a magnetic-response feature often used when assessing aromaticity. The authors described “Rollercoaster ring currents in an isomer of hexasilabenzene” as causing the large range of silicon-29 NMR shifts of the central four silicon atoms. Their analysis found an unusual ring-current topology, without a paramagnetic vortex in the ring center; it does not reduce to the simple magnetic picture a reader might expect from benzene. The article first appeared on 16 November 2010 in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (DOI 10.1002/anie.201003988).
Was it useful for electronics?
In 2010, coverage suggested that analogous silicon compounds might eventually matter for optical electronics. That was a possible future direction, not a demonstrated device, material application or commercial technology. The result’s established significance in the cited reports is chemical: it showed a striking silicon framework and offered a distinctive explanation for its electron delocalization and magnetic response.
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How it fits into silicon chemistry
Work on aromatic silicon compounds continued after this report, but later examples are not the same molecule. A 2023 Journal of the American Chemical Society paper reported neutral two-pi-electron aromatic silicon four-membered rings with distinct structures and chemistry (DOI 10.1021/jacs.3c06555). That later result provides context for a continuing field; it does not change the topology or the specific six-electron proposal made for the 2010 Si6R6 compound.
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