Facile Oxidative Addition of Aryl Iodides to Gold(I) by Ligand Design: Bending Turns on Reactivity

Thanks to rational ligand design, the first gold­(I) complexes to undergo oxidative addition of aryl iodides were discovered. The reaction proceeds under mild conditions and is general. The ensuing aryl gold­(III) complexes have been characterized by spectroscopic and crystallographic means. DFT calculations indicate that the bending induced by the diphosphine ligand plays a key role in this process.