These SOS volumes provide a user's guide to NHC chemistry and catalysis, thus facilitating the introduction of NHCs to novices and also helping to expand the repertoire of synthetic tools available to the more-advanced researcher, enabling the design of new catalysts and reactions.


Volume 1 provides a detailed introduction to NHCs, with discussion of their architectures and steric and electronic properties. The synthesis of NHC precursors, NHCs themselves, and metal-NHC complexes is described. The use of NHCs in cross-coupling chemistry (carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond formation), C-H bond functionalization, and addition reactions to carbon-carbon multiple bonds is reviewed.


Volume 2 covers the use of NHCs in the various types of metathesis reaction, polymerization, cyclization reactions, oxidation reactions, and carbonylation/carboxylation reactions. The use of NHCs in asymmetric transition-metal catalysis is highlighted, as are recyclable systems (biphasic, covalently immobilized, and ionically tagged systems), NHCs in flow chemistry, and recent advances in the use of NHCs in organocatalysis.