The Chemical Most Chemists Won't Touch
Azidoazide azide is the most explosive chemical compound ever created. It is part of a class of chemicals known as high-nitrogen energetic materials, and it gets its "bang" from the 14 nitrogen atoms that compose it in a loosely bound state. This material is both highly reactive and highly explosive. It's so
In his aptly named article, Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More Or Less, chemist Derek Lowe explains a research group's attempt to study the stuff, illustrating just how explosive we're talking: "The compound exploded in solution, it exploded on any attempts to touch or move the solid, and (most interestingly) it exploded when they were trying to get an infrared spectrum of it." Suffice it to say, this chemical will explode if you so much as look at it funny.
it’s a beast, all right. The compound is wildly, ridiculously endothermic, with a heat of formation of 357 kcal/mole, all of which energy is ready to come right back out at the first provocation (see below). To add to the fun, the X-ray crystal structure shows some rather strange bond distances, which indicate that there’s a lot of charge separation – the azides are somewhat positive, and the tetrazole ring somewhat negative, which is a further sign that the whole thing is trembling on the verge of not existing at all.
Why Does It Exist?
Obviously, you won't see azidoazide azide for sale in your local hardware store any time soon. While other azides have their uses in creating explosives and aiding medicine—sodium azide, for example, plays a role in the world of medical devices—azidoazide azide is entirely the realm of experimental chemistry. It's a good thing, too. We'd rather leave this chemical to the professionals.