Weak Interactions in Stabilized Silylium Ions – WISSI

The activation of thermally stable small molecules is one of the central tasks in catalysis and modern synthetic chemistry, which is closely related to some important issues for our society such as hydrogen economy or carbon dioxide conversion into organic materials. Such processes require new catalysts. Therefore, the access to new highly active species is the key to gain in efficiency and to find novel activation modes, which potentially allow to develop new catalytic reactions.
In this context, we considered silyl cations, which present extraordinarily strong Lewis acid character, as catalysts having a high potential. However, the application of silylium ions in synthesis and catalysis is still quite limited due to their inherent exceptional reactivity. Moreover, chiral induction with these species has yet to be investigated.
We thus propose in this research program, the development of new ligand systems which allow to finely control the stability and reactivity of silyl cations. These systems having the potential for chirality, another important objective of the project will be the investigation of such chiral silylium ion complexes in an effort to combine their inherent high reactivity with enantioselective processes. The use of chiral silylium ions as efficient Lewis acid catalysts in organic transformations would have a significant impact on enantioselective organic synthesis.