Treatmento ft wo equivalents of the triphosphenium zwitterion L with sources of Ni 0 and Pd 0 form the mononuclear h 2 -diphosphoniodiphosphene complexes 1 and 2.T he reactionb etween L and [FeCp(CO) 2 ] 2 resultsi n the binuclear m-h 1 :h 1 -diphosphoniodiphosphene iron complex 3,w hich features an alternative bondingm otif of the diphosphoniodiphosphene unit. The formation of these speciesh as been confirmed by spectroscopic methods and single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis, and their electronic structures have been elucidated using computational methods.Tremendous strides have been made in oligophosphorus chemistry over the past few decades. [1] An importants ubset of mixed coordinateP ÀPb onded compounds are so-called triphosphenium ions (Figure 1). [2] Anionic variants were first reported by Fluck, [3] and Schmidpeter subsequently developed the first cationic derivatives. [4,5] Since that time, the reactivity of the PPP fragment has been well developed by several groups,i ncluding our own. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] In spite of typicallyb eing drawn as having two lone pairs on the dicoordinate phosphorus atom (cf. phosphanides), triphosphenium cationsa re poor nucleophiles. This observation is exemplified by their inability to form isolable metal complexesa nd it has been rationalized by two factors:t heir overall positive charge, which stabilizes the highest occupied molecular orbital( HOMO), and the strong negative hyperconjugation( p-backbonding) of electron density from the centralp hosphorus atom into the flanking phosphines. [8] To overcome this deficiency,t he Ragogna group designed az witterionic triphosphenium that incorporates a negativelyc harged borate functionality into the backbone. [13,14] Apart from enhancing solubility,t hey demonstrated that this also enhancest he nucleophilicity of the central phosphorus atom and thus they were able to isolatet he first examples of triphosphenium metal complexes.O ur groupp ut forward another design for az witterionic triphosphenium incorporating a cyclopentadienide (Cp) fragment into the backbone. [15] Indeed, we were able to isolate many mono-andb i-metallic complexeso fL (see Figure 1), [16] but we were met with particularly interesting results while investigating L'sc oordinationc hemistry with late transitionm etals.Ta rgeting the complex NiL 2 ,t wo equivalents of L were reacted with one equivalent Ni(COD) 2 .E xamination of the 31 PNMR spectrum of the reactionm ixture gave ar emarkably clean spectrum,w hich featured ac omplex pattern with three second-order multiplets centered at À90.5, 9.5, and 15.3 ppm (Figure 2). The magnetic inequivalence apparent by these signals as well as the introduction of an ew chemically unique phosphorus environment suggested the formation of aP ÀPi nsertionp roduct, which would render the two phosphonio fragmentso ft he triphosphenium chemically inequivalent. Perplexingly,m ass spectrometry performedo nas ample of this product gave am olecular ion peak consistent with the composition NiL 2 ,t hough this speciesc ould ...