“…Second, similarly to the intramolecular reaction, the formation of the more stable ester C-O bond should be the driving force of the diaryl ether C-O cleavage, as the C-O bond energies of an aryl ether and an ester are about 78.8 and 87-93 kcal/mol, respectively 49,50 . However, the possible intermediate B may lack a stronger driving force of C-O bond cleavage, compared with the six-membered ring intermediates in the intramolecular reactions [42][43][44][45][46][47] . As mentioned below, less than 10% yields of the product were obtained with the remaining starting material under the optimized reaction conditions for intramolecular reactions (Table 1, entries 1, 2).…”