Asymmetric Diethylzinc Addition to N-Diphenylphosphinoyl Benzalimine Mediated by Imino Alcohols

As our continuous efforts to search for easily accessible ligands for dialkylzinc addition to imines,[1] in this paper,we would like to present a family of chiral imino alcohols 3 derived from 1,2-diphenyl-2-aminoethanol which will be evaluated for the titled reaction. We believed that this kind of chiral ligands could be good chiral ligands for the diethylzinc addition to imines based on two points: (1) The excellent asymmetrically inductive properties of 1,2-diphenyl-2-aminoethanol and its derivatives have been proven in many reactions. (2) The conformation of the nitrogen in the chiral imines 3 is restricted by imine function which is similar to chiral oxazolines reported in our recent work.……