High-pressure Synthesis of Aluminium Nitrides and Antimony Nirrides

Creating new high-energy density materials containing polymeric nitrogen is of great interest. Improved theoretical methods help predict crystal structures under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature. This approach has predicted several new Al-N phases with possible high-energy density properties. However, these phases still need to be experimentally verified. We have observed a new Al-N phase in our preliminary experiments with high-pressure laser heating (LH) experiments. This discovery motivates us to propose further investigations into this and other theoretically predicted phases. In this proposal, we propose to carry out the synthesis of metal nitrides and study their structural stability up to 50 GPa using synchrotron x-ray diffraction facilities.