Solvent capabilities of liquid and supercritical xenon

A great majority of “interesting” compounds in fluorine and noble gas chemistry are thermodynamically unstable, highly oxidative and thus hard to isolate and characterize materials. Since the ultimate characterization structural determination is very often related to a route to crystalline products, the aforementioned unique properties severely restrict the choice of a solvent for these compounds to a few inorganic (BrF5, IF5, SF6, anhydrous HF, SOClF, etc.) and in some cases organic solvents (CH3CN, fluorotrichloromethane, etc.). However, several coordination complexes with noble gas fluorides for example, especially those with large polyionic units [1], remain insoluble in solvents mentioned above. In this work we report some preliminary results of three experiments made in order to investigate the solvent potential of liquid and near-supercritical xenon on these systems.