Halides, aryl, arylation from aryldiazonium salt

Aryldiazonium salts react with bis(dibenzylideneacetone)palladium to form arylpalladium salts and nitrogen. Therefore, diazonium salts may be employed to catalytically arylate alkenes under mild conditions. Since many aryl halides are made from diazonium salts this variation could even be more convenient than using aryl halides. The reaction proceeds in good to excellent yields in nonaqueous solvents, using sodium acetate as the base at room temperature with terminal alkenes and cyclopentene." Internal alkenes usually give poor yields, however. 

Aryldiazonium salts, usually obtained from arylamines, undergo replacement of the diazonium group with a variety of nucleophiles to provide advantageous methods for producing aryl halides, cyanides, phenols and arenes by reductive removal of the diazo group. Coupling reaction of aryldiazonium salts with phenols or arylamines give rise to the formation of azo dyes. 

Similar reactions have been carried out with naphthalene and thiophene. The method has been employed only to a limited extent 23 since its discovery, probably because it involves the isolation of the dry diazonium salts and because a number of aryldiazonium salts (from o- and p-toluidine and /3-naphthylamine) gave no biaryls but only the corresponding aryl halides. 

Although nitriles lack an acyl group, they are considered acid derivatives because they hydrolyze to carboxylic acids. Nitriles are frequently made from carboxylic acids (with the same number of carbons) by conversion to primary amides followed by dehydration. They are also made from primary alkyl halides and tosylates (adding one carbon) by nucleophilic substitution with cyanide ion. Aryl cyanides can be made by the Sandmeyer reaction of an aryldiazonium salt with cuprous cyanide. a-Hydroxynitriles (cyanohydrins) are made by the reaction of ketones and aldehydes with HCN. 

Aryl halides are frequently prepared from the corresponding aryldiazonium salts by diazotation procedures. However, diazonium salts can be subjected directly to very mild Heck arylation conditions, which deliver coupled products (entry 19). Preferably, the reaction is executed in nonaqueous solvents such as acetonitrile, acetone, or methylene chloride with sodium acetate as base and with palladiumbis(dibenzylideneacetone) as catalyst. Alternatively, a combination of the amine and f-butyl nitrite, in a mixture of acetic acid and monochloroacetic acid, can provide the desired product directly, which makes the isolation of a diazonium salt unnecessary (entry 20). " It is also possible to use aromatic acid anhydrides as oxidative addition precursors (entry 21). Clearly, anhydrides are very interesting starting materials for a number of Heck reactions due to price and absence of halide salt formation. 

Another important class of reactions involves the introduction of a cyano group by substitution in an Ar-Z precursor. In fact, novel pathways leading to aromatic nitriles-for example, photosubstitution reactions-are desirable in view of the many applications of aryl cyanides as agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Today, the classical copper(l)-mediated Rosenmund-von Braun and Sandmeyer reactions, from aryl halides and aryldiazonium salts respectively, have been supplanted by reactions which employ palladium- or copper-catalysis [57]. The rather common use of excess cyanide anion may lead to a deactivation of the catalyst, and affect to a remarkable extent each of the key steps of the catalytic cycle [58aj. Although the use of complex iron cyanide has been shown to offer an effective solution to this limitation [58b,c], photocyanation provides an equally useful alternative [10],... 

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