Abstract

A quantitative knowledge of the refractivities and anisotropies of some organic molecules, aromatic and aliphatic, of different shapes and containing various electronic groupings was obtained. The studied aromatic compounds include three rings and one ring with different substituents while the aliphatic compounds contain six-membered rings, five-membered rings and open chains. The results show that strong magnetic anisotropy is always associated with strong optical anisotropy, and the optical anisotropy of the molecules divided by that of the benzene molecule is smaller than the corresponding value for magnetic anisotropy. Also the optical anisotropy in the case of aromatic compounds is markedly decreased by substitution.