Spoiler alert: they aren't worth very much! The finding is remarkable as it might be anticipated from x-ray structures, gas-phase calculations and chemical intuition that bringing a polarisable halogen (especially iodine) into contact with a polarisable aromatic ring might result in substantial favourable London dispersion interactions, but this seems not to be the case; at least not in the Wilcox molecular balance that we employed for the study. All the halogen-arene interactions were disfavoured, with iodine being the most disfavoured. In stark contrast, the methyl-arene interaction was weakly favourable. The work was also highlighted in Chemistry Views:
Congratulations to Andrew West, Nick Dominelli-Whiteley and Ivan Smoliar on getting their work on measuring the energetics of halogen-arene van der Waals contacts in solution published in Angewandte Chemie.
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