A rewarding synthetic target is the title compound 1, only a stretched-bond isomer of which should be stable according to the results of ab initio calculations. The bridgehead Si atoms are 2.73 Å apart, and the bond order between them is only 0.176. This is consistent with the substantial diradical character of the singlet wave function of 1 and with the fact that Si four-membered rings are energetically more favorable than Si three-membered rings.
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Schleyer et al. (1987) studied this question.