Magnetite tethered mesoionic carbene-palladium (II): An efficient and reusable nanomagnetic catalyst for Suzuki-Miyaura and Mizoroki-Heck cross-coupling reactions in aqueous medium

In this paper, a highly active, air- and moisture-stable and easily recoverable magnetic nanoparticles tethered mesoionic carbene palladium (II) complex (MNPs-MIC-Pd) as nanomagnetic catalyst was successfully synthesized by a simplistic multistep synthesis under aerobic conditions using commercially available inexpensive chemicals for the first time. The synthesized MNPs-MIC-Pd nanomagnetic catalyst was in-depth characterized by numerous physicochemical techniques such as FT-IR, ICP-AES, FESEM, EDS, TEM, p-XRD, XPS, TGA and BET surface area analysis. The prepared MNPs-MIC-Pd nanomagnetic catalyst was used to catalyze the Suzuki-Miyaura and Mizoroki-Heck cross-coupling reactions and exhibited excellent catalytic activity for various substrates under mild reaction conditions. Moreover, MNPs-MIC-Pd nanomagnetic catalyst could be easily and rapidly recovered by applying an external magnet. The recovered MNPs-MIC-Pd nanomagnetic catalyst exhibited very good catalytic activity up to ten times in Suzuki-Miyaura and five times in Mizoroki-Heck cross-coupling reactions without considerable loss of its catalytic activity. However, MNPs-MIC-Pd nanomagnetic catalyst shows notable advantages such as heterogeneous nature, efficient catalytic activity, mild reaction conditions, easy magnetic work up and recyclability.