“…Following previous work on the stabilization of unsaturated, low-valent transition-metal fragments using the widebite-angle, electron-accepting ligand XDPP (bis-2,5-diphenylphosphole xantphos 1), [11,18] in 2009 we isolated the first AuÀH complex featuring a phosphine ligand in the form of the Au 2 H + species, 2-OTf (Scheme 1). [12] The stability of this species is undoubtedly linked to our peculiar ligand, as it is known in the literature that the reaction of [(R 3 P)AuCl] complexes with stoichiometric amounts of hydride sources leads to the formation of Au clusters without observation of Au À H bonds, [13,14] and that an excess of hydride sources can lead to the formation of phosphine-stabilized Au nanoparticles. [15] As far as catalysis is concerned, Ito showed that only Au I chloride complexes, B (Scheme 1), featuring wide-biteangle ligands of the xantphos (xantphos = 4,5-bis(diphenylphosphino)-9,9-dimethylxanthene) type, were efficient precatalysts for dehydrogenative silylation.…”