Carbenes Stabilized by Ylides: Pushing the Limits

摘要

The most successful strategies for taming carbenes consist of coordination to a transition-metal fragment and/or the attachment of heteroatoms to their formally divalent carbon atom. The latter concept was particularly successful for nitrogen as the heteroelement and has resulted in the numerous variants of (di)aminostabilized carbenes with cyclic and acyclic backbones known to date. It is the overlap of the lone pair of electrons on the nitrogen atom with the empty p orbital of the carbene which is essential for stabilizing the reactive site (Figure 1).