Cyanonitrene, triplet ground state

Anastassiou has provided very strong evidence for collisionally induced relaxation of singlet cyanonitrene to its triplet ground state.67 Thermolysis of cyanogen azide at 40-45° in cis- or trans-1,2-dimethyl-... 

Cyanogen azide is an abundant source of the spectroscopically interesting symmetric cyanonitrene N=G=N . Both the thermal and the photolytic decomposition of N3CN lead to singlet excited nitrenes, as evidenced by stereospecific interception and by spectroscopy. The singlet nitrene decays subsequendy to the triplet ground state of the species . 

For cyanonitrene it was shown that the linear structure is favored over the bent one and the ground state is a triplet... 

The singlet lifetime has been experimentally established only for cyanonitrene which in the gas phase converts to the ground state triplet at the rate of about lO sec . An estimate of singlet lifetimes in solution can be obtained from the work of McConaghy and Lwowski . They find that in the thermolysis of ethyl azidoformate in the presence of cfj-4-methylpent-2-ene the rate of spin reversal of the nitrene is about 10 times slower than the rate of addition to the... 

---