Some time ago an otherwise unremarkeble submission to Organic Letters got me annoyed. The topic was energetic materials, you know correct-speech for explosives and the authors were Russians. So far so good but what got me annoyed was the graphical abstract with what looked like something very similar to a missile. A missile of the type that Russians like to hurl at Ukranians? Must be the first graphic abstract in history containing a not so subtle levelyhood threat. It did not help that the publication was dated april first and that the Russians hailed from the Zelinski Institute of Organic chemistry in Moscow. An april first joke in poor taste? The other graphical representations in the same abstract I also do not know what to make of (military emblems?). If my assessment is wrong please let me know.

With a very recent publication on hexanitrogen (N₆) I could not help scanning through the author list but this blog has a strict good-faith policy and nothing is going to change that. W. Quian et al. from the Justus Liebig University Giessen report the synthesis of acyclic hexanitrogen (doi). Although several hypothetical nitrogen allotropes exist (hexazine, octaazacubane), hexanitrogen would be the first new neutral nitrogen allotrope after trinitrogen and tetranitrogen.

And apparently easy to make. You take silver azide (in itself an explosive) and react it with bromine gas at reduced pressure and room temperature and trap the reaction products at 77 kelvin (liquid dinitrogen) on a quartz tube. The initial reaction product is BrN₃ and then it is to the N₃⁺ cation and the N₃^- anion to recombine. N₆ identification was based on infrared spectroscopy and UV-VIS. The molecule is not believed to be linear with rather a trans di-azide. The Gibbs energy of activation for the decomposition into two azide radicals is much higher than that of decomposition onto three dinitrogen molecules and even that energy is sufficiently high to deem hexanitrogen a stable molecule. For the explosion enthousiasts: hexanitrogen can release 2.2 times the amount of energy as TNT.