Addition of allylmagnesium reagents to an aliphatic aldehyde bearing a radical clock gave only addition products and no evidence of ring-opened products that would suggest single-electron-transfer reactions. The analogous Barbier reaction also did not provide evidence for a single-electron-transfer mechanism in the addition step. Other Grignard reagents (methyl-, vinyl-, t-Bu-, and triphenylmet...

An efficient solventless protocol for the preparation of a wide variety of ionic liquids is described, which requires a simple exposure of admixed 1-methylimidazole and alkyl halides to microwave irradiation in open glass containers. The details of this clean process using a common household microwave oven, which exploits the newer inverter technology system for better power attenuation, are de...

The mechanism of the iron-catalyzed cross-coupling of alkyl halides with aryl Grignard reagents is studied by a combination of GC monitoring and DFT calculation. Herein, we investigate two possible reaction pathways, the regular oxidative addition (OA) pathway and the atom transfer (AT) pathway that might occur in the rate-limiting step. The computational studies revealed that the AT pathway re...

Ruthenium phosphido complexes have been shown to be excellent nucleophiles, reacting via two-electron processes with a variety of electrophiles. A catalytic alkylation reaction was developed using an achiral ruthenium complex, which was then elaborated into a catalytic enantioselective synthesis of P-stereogenic phosphines. These useful and synthetically challenging phosphines can now be access...

The synthesis of a variety of 2-oxindoles bearing an all-carbon quaternary center at the pseudo benzylic position has been achieved via a 'transition-metal-free' intramolecular dehydrogenative coupling (IDC). The construction of 2-oxindole moieties was carried out through formation of carbon-carbon bonds using KOt-Bu-catalyzed one pot C-alkylation of β-N-arylamido esters with alkyl halides foll...

High-level ab initio molecular orbital calculations are used to study the thermodynamics and electrochemistry relevant to the mechanism of atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). Homolytic bond dissociation energies (BDEs) and standard reduction potentials (SRPs) are reported for a series of alkyl halides (R-X; R = CH 2CN, CH(CH 3)CN, C(CH 3) 2CN, CH 2COOC 2H 5, CH(CH 3)COOCH 3, C(CH 3) 2C...