Chemical properties

This section develops the chemical reactivity of halogen derivatives across seven sub-sections. It opens with a simple qualitative laboratory test that confirms the presence of halogen in an organic compound (10.6.1), then develops nucleophilic substitution (SN) as the characteristic reaction of alkyl halides -- first cataloguing the range of nucleophiles that react with alkyl halides and the products they give (10.6.2), then working out the two possible mechanisms, SN1 and SN2, from reaction kinetics (10.6.3), and then the structural, reagent and solvent factors that decide which of the two mechanisms a given alkyl halide actually follows (10.6.4). It then turns to the competing elimination (dehydrohalogenation) reaction and Saytzeff's rule for predicting the major alkene product (10.6.5), to reactions of alkyl halides with active metals -- forming Grignard reagents with magnesium, and coupling via the Wurtz reaction with sodium (10.6.6) -- and finally, because aryl halides behave quite differently from alkyl halides, to the reactions specific to h …