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A Bigger Bang
The Highest Energy Molecule Yet
One of my youthful activities that led to studying chemistry was making fuel for my homemade rockets. Just about every mixture that worked had nitrogen-containing molecules, usually nitrates. While these were oxidizing agents, lending oxygen to combine with the other parts of the fuel, part of the reaction mass (and thus the thrust) was pure nitrogen.
In my book Boom!: The Chemistry and History of Explosives, I discuss many nitrogen-containing molecules, but also some made just of nitrogen.
So when I read about a recent breakthrough in nitrogen chemistry, I read the paper eagerly.
The air is mostly dinitrogen — two atoms of nitrogen joined by a very strong triple bond. This molecule is neutral (neither positive nor negative), and because the bond is hard to break, it is both stable and unreactive.
Hard to break bonds like this one release a lot of energy when we create them. Many high explosives have nitrogen atoms that are attached to other atoms with weaker bonds, and when the atoms rearrange to allow the nitrogens to pair up, a lot of energy gets released.
Conversely, we have to add a lot of energy to break up those bonds to make nitrogen-containing molecules for rocket fuel, explosives, or fertilizers. We call the resulting products…
