A DIFFERENT STORY OF BENZENE

The paper summarizes a collaborative research of the authors over more than a decade, as described by the speaker (S. Shaik) at the recent W ATOC conference in Jerusalem during July 8-12, 1996. This is a story o f the attempts of the authors to drive home the idea that the pi-elect ronic component of benzene and other conjugated systems has a dual cha racter. The pi-component is, on the one hand, distortive along a local izing mode, and on the other hand, it is stabilized by resonance energ y relative to a localized reference. The text of the paper-is a modifi ed transcript of the talk and as such, the paper conserves the active voice of the speaker S. Shaik and the personalized style of his talk. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.