Metal azides under pressure: An emerging class of high energy density materials

Abstract

Metal azides are well-known for their explosive properties such as detonation or deflagration. As chemically pure sources of nitrogen, alkali metal azides under high pressure have the ability to form polymeric nitrogen, an ultimate green high energy density material with energy density three times greater than that of known high energetic materials. With this motive, in this present work, we try to address the high-pressure behaviour of LiN3 and KN3 by means of density functional calculations. All the calculations are performed with the inclusion of van der Waals interactions at semi empirical level, as these materials are typical molecular solids. We found that both LiN3 and KN3 are structurally stable up to the studied pressure range of 60 GPa and 16 GPa, respectively. At ambient conditions both the materials are insulators with a gap of 3.48 eV (LiN3) and 4.08 eV (KN3) and as pressure increases the band gap decreases and show semiconducting nature at high pressures. We also found that the compressibility of both the crystals is anisotropic which is in good agreement with experiment. Our theoretical study proved that the materials under study may have the ability to form polymeric nitrogen because of the decrease in interazide ion distance and possible overlapping of N atomic orbitals. The calculated total and partial density of states of LiN3 (left) at 60 GPa and KN3 (right) at 16 GPa are shown. Clearly, as pressure increases the width of the p-states of ‘N’ atom in the valence band increases in both the compounds implying that the intra molecular interactions between the N atoms of the azide ion enhance under pressure.