Lewis Acidity Scale of Diaryliodonium Ions toward Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Halogen Lewis Bases.

Equilibrium constants for the associations of 17 diaryliodonium salts ArIX with 11 different Lewis bases (halide ions, carboxylates, -nitrophenolate, amines, and tris(-anisyl)phosphine) have been investigated by titrations followed by photometric or conductometric methods as well as by isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) in acetonitrile at 20 °C. The resulting set of equilibrium constants covers 6 orders of magnitude and can be expressed by the linear free-energy relationship lg = LA + LB, which characterizes iodonium ions by the Lewis acidity parameter LA, as well as the iodonium-specific affinities of Lewis bases by the Lewis basicity parameter LB and the susceptibility . Least squares minimization with the definition LA = 0 for PhI and = 1.00 for the benzoate ion provides Lewis acidities LA for 17 iodonium ions and Lewis basicities LB and for 10 Lewis bases. The lack of a general correlation between the Lewis basicities LB (with respect to ArI) and LB (with respect to ArCH) indicates that different factors control the thermodynamics of Lewis adduct formation for iodonium ions and carbenium ions. Analysis of temperature-dependent equilibrium measurements as well as ITC experiments reveal a large entropic contribution to the observed Gibbs reaction energies for the Lewis adduct formations from iodonium ions and Lewis bases originating from solvation effects. The kinetics of the benzoate transfer from the bis(4-dimethylamino)-substituted benzhydryl benzoate ArCH-OBz to the phenyl(perfluorophenyl)iodonium ion was found to follow a first-order rate law. The first-order rate constant was not affected by the concentration of Ph(CF)I indicating that the benzoate release from ArCH-OBz proceeds via an unassisted 1-type mechanism followed by interception of the released benzoate ions by Ph(CF)I ions.