Access

Research Highlights

Nature Chemistry (3 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/nchem.205

Energetic materials: Burn baby burn

Neil Withers

Explosives — energetic materials containing an oxidizer and a fuel — can be categorized as either low or high order, examples being gunpowder and TNT respectively. The molecules in high-order explosives contain both an oxidizing part and a fuel part, and performance is usually a trade-off between energy density and reaction rate.