Quaternary compound
any chemical compound having a quaternary cation
In chemistry, a quaternary compound is a compound consisting of exactly four chemical elements.
In another use of the term in organic chemistry, a quaternary compound is or has a cation consisting of a central positively charged atom with four substituents, especially organic (alkyl and aryl) groups, discounting hydrogen atoms.
The best-known quaternary compounds are quaternary ammonium salts, having a nitrogen atom at the center. For example, in the following reaction, the nitrogen atom is said to be quaternized as it has gone from 3 to 4 substituents:
R3N + RCl → R4N+Cl−
Other examples include substituted phosphonium salts (R4P+), substituted arsonium salts (R4As+) like arsenobetaine, as well as some arsenic-containing superconductors. Substituted stibonium (R4Sb+) and bismuthonium salts (R4Bi+) have also been described.
“Quaternary compound” enters the record as any chemical compound having a quaternary cation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quaternary, compound and chemical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quaternary compound” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.