Radical Arylations

Abstract

This chapter reports on radical arylations also highlighting the very important early achievements on this chemistry. To be named at this place are the Meerwein arylation and the Pschorr reaction. Intramolecular homolytic aromatic substitutions with aryl radicals and various arene radical acceptors for formation of biaryls are discussed. Along with reactive aryl radicals, nucleophilic and also electrophilic alkyl radicals can cyclise to arenes providing products of an intramolecular homolytic aromatic substitution. Discussion on the mechanism is provided. Moreover, it will be shown that this chemistry has successfully been used in complex natural product synthesis. A subchapter is devoted to radical aryl migration reactions. Finally, reactions of aryl radicals with olefins are discussed. It is also shown that aryl radicals react efficiently with various heteroatom based radical acceptors for aryl-X bond formation (X = Se, S, Te, B, P).