Oxidative Addition to Palladium(0) Made Easy through Photoexcited-State Metal Catalysis: Experiment and Computation

Visible-light induced, palladium catalyzed alkylations of α,β-unsaturated acids with unactivated alkyl bromides are described. A variety of primary, secondary, and tertiary alkyl bromides are activated by the photoexcited palladium metal catalyst to provide a series of olefins at room temperature under mild reaction conditions. Mechanistic investigations and density functional theory (DFT) studies suggest that a photoinduced inner-sphere mechanism is operative in which a barrierless, single-electron transfer oxidative addition of the alkyl halide to Pd⁰ is key for the efficient transformation.