The title of the ‘Hot Article’ by John Slattery and Sharifa Hussein quite succinctly describes their research ‘How Lewis acidic is your cation? Putting phosphenium ions on the fluoride ion affinity scale’. The authors calculated the fluoride ion affinities (FIA’s) using ab initio and DFT methods to find out the relative Lewis acidities of over thirty phosphenium ions with a range of substituents, while I wouldn’t want to spoil the paper by giving away the reactivity series I will report that the authors noted there is “some hope that phosphenium ions that are currently unknown as “free” ions may yet be isolable without recourse to mesomeric stabilisation”.
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How Lewis acidic is your cation? Putting phosphenium ions on the fluoride ion affinity scale
John M. Slattery and Sharifa Hussein
Dalton Trans., 2012, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C1DT11636C
