An efficient catalytic method for hydrophosphination of heterocumulenes with diethylzinc as precatalyst without a solvent

Commercially available compound ZnEt2 acts as an efficient precatalyst for the solvent-free hydrophosphinations of heterocumulenes using Ph2PH as reagent. As far as we knew, this has been not reported in group 12 metal catalyzing reactions. A suggested mechanism of this reaction is explored, and the intermediate [{Ph2PC((NPr)-Pr-i)(2)}ZnEt](2) is obtained and characterized by a single-crystal X-ray structural analysis.