ИСТИНА

In the recent years, several reports have been published regarding fullerene cage surgery under chlorination with SbCl 5 and/or VCl 4 at 350 ◦ C [1]. The connectivity pattern and/or the number of carbon atoms are altered via various sequences of the two ba- sic steps: Stone-Wales rearrangements and C 2 losses. The resulting products include fullerenes with fused pentagons stabilized by exohedral chlorination and even non- classical chlorinated cages with heptagonal rings. Herein, we report a DFT study of the branched sequence of C 2 losses observed in C 102 (19) under chlorination with VCl 4 + SbCl 5 . Two different compounds form com- petitively: a non-classical C 98 Cl 26 with two heptagons and two different triple pen- tagon assemblies and a classical non-IPR 185115 C 96 Cl 28 . We analyze energetics of both creation and elimination of heptagons upon C 2 loss and illustrate definitive effect of chlorination patterns on the regiochemistry of skeletal transformations. The present work was supported by the RFBR grants 16-33-00496, 15-03-05083 and 15-03-04464.