I recently came across a paper by Bickelhaupt and coworkers discussing front and backside attack in SN2 reactions. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/j...

Interesting read so I calculated the intrinsic reaction coordinates for both types for the reaction between methyl bromide and chloride (B3LYP/6311+G(d,p), gas phase, gaussian09).

Hope you enjoy!

#NucleophilicSubstitution #DFT #ShinyChemistry