Why it is difficult to remove chlorine as nucleophilic from benzene rather than alkyl Halide?
1 Answer
Mar 4, 2018
Consider the cases you describe, respectively,
In most introductory courses, it's satisfactory to remember that nucleophilic attacks generally don't occur at anything with more
If that doesn't satisfy you, consider:
In nucleophilic substitution, we want to keep things very lower in energy. The lowest energy unoccupied molecular orbital is generally a
Attacking the latter will result in a higher energy transition state, which is unlikely given the general theme in chemistry is stability.
For a more detailed explanation, I'd suggest this discussion.