High-pressure phases of a Mn–N system

Highly compressed extended states of light elemental solids have emerged recently as a novel group of energetic materials. The application of these materials is seriously limited by the energy-safety contradiction, because the material with high energy density is highly metastable and can hardly be recovered under ambient conditions. Recently, it has been found that high-energy density transition metal polynitrides could be synthesized at ∼100 GPa and recovered at ∼20 GPa. Inspired by these findings, we have studied a high-pressure Mn-N system from the aspects of structure, stability, phase transition, energy density and electronic structure theoretically for the first time. The results reveal that MnN4_P1̄ consisting of [N4]∞2- is thermodynamically stable at 36.9-100 GPa, dynamically stable at 0 GPa and has a noticeably high volumetric energy density of 15.71 kJ cm-3. Upon decompression, this structure will transform to MnN4_C2/m with the transition barrier declining sharply at 5-10 GPa due to the switching of transition pathways. Hence, we propose MnN4_P1̄ as a potential energetic material that is synthesizable above 40 GPa and recoverable until 10 GPa.