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(NiPr)2}ZnEt]2 is obtained and characterized by a single-crystal X-ray structural analysis.