• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.781-788
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• 2010

Experimental and theoretical studies show that all covalent azides possess a nonlinear azide group. They also rationalize this remarkable structural feature. We have seen that the most important non-covalent contributions in the covalently bound azides system (X-N1-N2-N3) are the $\pi$-delocalization over the entire molecule and a strong negative hyperconjugation which donates electron density from the filled $\sigma$ (X-N1) orbital into the unfilled, antibonding $\pi^*$ (N2-N3) orbital. For transition metal azide complexes, a bent configuration and a small difference between the N-N bond lengths, generally the longer one being adjacent to the transition metal, were observed.