The Mechanism and Stereochemistry of Wittig Reactions of Phosphonium Ylide-Anions

Abstract

Schmidbaur's group have extensively investigated¹ the coordination properties of phosphonium 1,3-ylide-anions (1) in organometallic chemistry and more recently Cristau² has reported the potential usefulness of these compounds in synthetic organic chemistry. There have been a few studies³ of specific phosphonium 1,1-ylide-anions (2), however their only use in the Wittig reaction appears to be that of (2a).⁴ We have set out to study the stereochemistry and mechanism of Wittig reactions of (1) and (2) and to carry out some preliminary investigations on the arsenic analogues (3).