The trifluoromethoxy group is the chemical group –O–. It can be seen as a methoxy group –O– whose hydrogen atoms are replaced by fluorine atoms or as a trifluoromethyl group attached to the rest of the molecule by a bridging oxygen atom. Either leads to viable syntheses,Synthetic Approaches to Trifluoromethoxy-Substituted Compounds A. Tlili, F. Toulgoat, T. Billard, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2016, 55, 11726–11735; but in 2022 "the synthesis of CF3O- compounds suffer[ed] from restricted methods and remain[ed] difficult. In particular, the direct introduction of the CF3O motif onto organic substrates [was] still poorly described," partly because trifluoromethoxide easily decomposes to difluorophosgene.Clémence Bonnefoy, Emmanuel Chefdeville, Armen Panossian, Gilles Hanquet, Frédéric R. Leroux, et al. "Study of a stable "trifluoromethoxide anion solution" arising from 2,4-dinitro-trifluoromethoxybenzene. Chemistry - A European Journal, 2021, 27 (64), pp. 1–2. (HAL pagination). . ⟨hal-03582991⟩.
Compounds having this functional group are of some relevance as pharmaceuticals, because it is a much more hydrophobic analogue of chlorine. One example is riluzole.
See also Trifluoromethylation
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