A New Route to Metal Azides

Beside several other applications, metal azides can be used for the synthesis of nitridophosphates and binary nitrides. Herein we present a novel synthetic access to azides: Several metals, such as main-group, transition metals, and rare-earth metals, react with silver azide in liquid ammonia as a solvent giving the corresponding metal azides. In this work Mn(N-3)(2), Sn(N-3)(2), and Eu(N-3)(2), as well as their ammonia complexes were synthesized for the first time through low-temperature methods. Also a simpler access to Zn(N-3)(2) was possible. At room temperature and the respective vapor pressure of NH3, it became possible to grow single crystals of the dinuclear holmium azide [Ho-2(-NH2)(3)(NH3)(10)](N-3)(3)1.25NH(3). We are confident that this new route could lead to novel metal azides as well as nitrides of the main-group, the transition, and the rare-earth metals upon careful decomposition.