Toward a Physical Interpretation of Substituent Effects: The Case of Fluorine and Trifluoromethyl Groups

The application of ab initio and DFT computational methods at six different levels of theory (MP2/cc-pVDZ, MP2/aug-cc-pVTZ, B3LYP/cc-pVDZ, B3LYP/aug-cc-pVTZ, M06/cc-pVDZ, and M06/aug-cc-pVTZ) to <i>meta</i>- and <i>para</i>-substituted fluoro- and trifluoromethylbenzene derivatives and to 1-fluoro- and 1-trifluoromethyl-2-substituted <i>trans</i>-ethenes allowed the study of changes in the electronic and geometric properties of F- and CF₃-substituted systems under the impact of other substituents (BeH, BF₂, BH₂, Br, CFO, CHO, Cl, CN, F, Li, NH₂, NMe₂, NO, NO₂, OH, H, CF₃, and CH₃). Various parameters of these systems have been investigated, including homodesmotic reactions in terms of the substituent effect stabilization energy (SESE), the π and σ electron donor–acceptor indexes (<i>p</i>EDA and <i>s</i>EDA, respectively), the charge on the substituent active region (cSAR, known earlier as qSAR), and bond lengths, which have been regressed against Hammett constants, resulting mostly in an accurate correspondence except in the case of <i>p</i>-fluorobenzene derivatives. Moreover, changes in the characteristics of the ability of the substituent to attract or donate electrons under the impact of the kind of moiety to which the substituent is attached have been considered as the <i>indirect substituent effect</i> and investigated by means of the cSAR model. Regressions of cSAR­(X) versus cSAR­(Y) for any systems X and Y allow final results to be obtained on the same scale of magnitude.