Switching the Reactivity of Palladium Diimines with 'Ancillary' Ligand to Select for Olefin Polymerization, Branching Regulation, or Olefin isomerization.

Coordinating solvents are commonly employed as ancillary ligands to stabilize late transition metal complexes and are conventionally considered to have little effect on the reaction products. Our work identifies that the presence of ancillary ligand in Pd-diimine catalyzed polymerizations of α-olefins can drastically alter reactivity. The addition of different amounts of acetonitrile allows for switching between distinct reaction modes: isomerization-polymerization with high branching (0 eq.), regular chain-walking polymerization (1 eq.), and alkene isomerization with no polymerization (>20 eq.). Optimization of the isomerization reaction mode led to a general set of conditions to switch a wide variety of diimine complexes into efficient alkene isomerization catalysts, with catalyst loading as low as 0.005 mol%.