No abstract

A four-membered cyclic intramolecular phosphane-borane adduct activates dihydrogen to yield the respective ethylene-bridged zwitterionic phosphonium-hydridoborate system, which reduces benzaldehyde.

A variety of donor adducts of tris(pentafluorophenyl)borane were experimentally generated by reaction of a Lewis base with an excess of B(C6F5)3 in pentane. In this way, nitrile complexes (C6F5)3B·NCR (R = CH3 1a, p-CH3−C6H4 1b, p-NO2−C6H4 1c), isonitrile complexes (C6F5)3B·CNR (R = C(CH3)3 3a, C(CH3)2CH2C(CH3)3 3b, 2,6-(CH3)2−C6H3 3c), and the phosphine adduct (C6F5)3B·P(C6H5)3 (6) could be prepared. The compounds were characterized by IR and NMR spectroscopy and by X-ray structure analyses (1a, 1c, 3a, 3b, and 6). Coordination of the nitriles as well as the isonitriles to the neutral Lewis acid leads to a substantial increase in the C⋮N bond strength. This is evident from a marked shift of the ν̃C ⋮ N IR band to higher wavenumbers, and this interpretation is supported by the small but experimentally significant decrease of the C⋮N bond length observed by X-ray diffraction. The experimental work is complemented by a density functional study on the model complexes (C6F5)3B·L, L = CNCH3, NCCH3, PH3, CO. A detailed analysis revealed that the bonding in (C6F5)3B·L complexes is mainly dominated by electrostatic interaction, which in turn is responsible for the observed structural and spectroscopic changes. In the context of this work, the bonding of the neutral B(C6F5)3 Lewis acid is compared to the positively charged organometallic d0-Cp3M+ system (M = Zr, Hf). It was found that electrostatic effects are more pronounced for B(C6F5)3 than for the transition metal fragments. The question as to the existence of a nonclassical main group carbonyl complex, (C6F5)3B·CO, is addressed.

In contrast to the many methods of selectively coupling olefins, few protocols catenate saturated hydrocarbons in a predictable manner. We report here the highly selective carbon-hydrogen (C-H) activation and subsequent dehydrogenative C-C coupling reaction of long-chain (>C(20)) linear alkanes on an anisotropic gold(110) surface, which undergoes an appropriate reconstruction by adsorption of the molecules and subsequent mild annealing, resulting in nanometer-sized channels (1.22 nanometers in width). Owing to the orientational constraint of the reactant molecules in these one-dimensional channels, the reaction takes place exclusively at specific sites (terminal CH(3) or penultimate CH(2) groups) in the chains at intermediate temperatures (420 to 470 kelvin) and selects for aliphatic over aromatic C-H activation.

The metal‐free hydrogen activator 1 catalyzes the unique P/B hydrogenation of the frustrated Lewis pair 3, which itself is inactive toward H2 under the applied conditions, to yield the hydrogenation product 4. System 1/2 (5 mol %) also catalyzes the hydrogenation of a bulky ketimine and of enamines under mild conditions (2.5 bar H2, RT) to yield the respective amines.