A Mild and General One-Pot Synthesis of Densely Functionalized Diaryliodonium Salts

Diaryliodonium salts are powerful and widely used arylating agents in organic chemistry. Here we report a scalable synthesis of densely functionalized diaryliodonium salts from aryl iodides under mild conditions. This two-step, one-pot process has remarkable functional group tolerance, is compatible with commonly employed acid-labile protective group strategies, avoids heavy metal and transition metal reagents, and provides a direct route to stable precursors to PET imaging agents.