The bowl-to-bowl inversion of the non-planar bowl-shaped compounds derivedfrom sumanene as a fullerene C3v fragment was found to be slow and tuned by a solvent, and the benzylic mono- and di-anions inverted even more slowly.
is a bowl-shaped pi-conjugated molecule with C3v symmetry, consisting of alternating benzene rings and cyclopentadiene rings around the central benzene ring. The structure corresponds to the smallest C3v-symmetric fragment for the structural motifs of fullerenes or end-caps of carbon nanotubes. The presence of three sp(3)-hybridized benzylic sites is one of the most characteristic structural features