Silver iodide
Silver iodide is an inorganic compound with the formula AgI. The compound is a bright yellow salt, but samples almost always contain impurities of metallic silver that give a grey colouration. The silver contamination arises because some samples of AgI can be highly photosensitive. This property is exploited in silver-based photography. Silver iodide is also used as an antiseptic and in cloud seeding.
Structure
The structure adopted by silver iodide is temperature dependent:- Below 420 K, the β phase of AgI, with the wurtzite structure, is most stable. This phase is encountered in nature as the mineral iodargyrite.
- Above 420 K, the α phase becomes more stable. This motif is a body-centered cubic structure which has the silver centers distributed randomly between 6 octahedral, 12 tetrahedral and 24 trigonal sites. At this temperature, Ag+ ions can move rapidly through the solid, allowing fast ion conduction. The transition between the β and α forms represents the melting of the silver sublattice. The entropy of fusion for α-AgI is approximately half that for sodium chloride. This can be rationalized by considering the AgI crystalline lattice to have already "partly melted" in the transition between α and β polymorphs.
- A metastable γ phase also exists below 420 K with the zinc blende structure.