Atomic orbital bonding states

A masterpiece written by a Nobel Prize winner, one of the founders of solid-state quantum chemistry. Solid-state theory was traditionally the domain of physicists. Some concepts typical of chemistry, such as atomic orbitals, bonding and antibonding effects, chemical bonds, and localization of orbitals, were usually absent in such descriptions. They are highlighted in this book. 

Fig. 1.5. Relative energies of atomic orbitals, bonding molecular orbitals and antibonding molecular orbitals in ground state.

Each of these tools has advantages and limitations. Ab initio methods involve intensive computation and therefore tend to be limited, for practical reasons of computer time, to smaller atoms, molecules, radicals, and ions. Their CPU time needs usually vary with basis set size (M) as at least M correlated methods require time proportional to at least M because they involve transformation of the atomic-orbital-based two-electron integrals to the molecular orbital basis. As computers continue to advance in power and memory size, and as theoretical methods and algorithms continue to improve, ab initio techniques will be applied to larger and more complex species. When dealing with systems in which qualitatively new electronic environments and/or new bonding types arise, or excited electronic states that are unusual, ab initio methods are essential. Semi-empirical or empirical methods would be of little use on systems whose electronic properties have not been included in the data base used to construct the parameters of such models. 

Carbon has six electrons around the atomic core as shown in Fig. 2. Among them two electrons are in the K-shell being the closest position from the centre of atom, and the residual four electrons in the L-shell. TTie former is the Is state and the latter are divided into two states, 2s and 2p. The chemical bonding between neighbouring carbon atoms is undertaken by the L-shell electrons. Three types of chemical bonds in carbon are single bond contributed from one 2s electron and three 2p electrons to be cited as sp bonding, double bond as sp and triple bond as sp from the hybridised atomic-orbital model. 

Valence bond and molecular orbital theory both incorporate the wave description of an atom s electrons into this picture of H2, but in somewhat different ways. Both assume that electron waves behave like more familiar waves, such as sound and light waves. One important property of waves is called interference in physics. Constructive interference occurs when two waves combine so as to reinforce each other (in phase) destructive interference occurs when they oppose each other (out of phase) (Figure 2.2). Recall from Section 1.1 that electron waves in atoms are characterized by then- wave function, which is the same as an orbital. For an electron in the most stable state of a hydrogen atom, for example, this state is defined by the I5 wave function and is often called the I5 orbital. The valence bond model bases the connection between two atoms on the overlap between half-filled orbitals of the two atoms. The molecular orbital model assembles a set of molecular- orbitals by combining the atomic orbitals of all of the atoms in the molecule. 

When N valence atomic orbitals overlap, they form N molecular orbitals. The ground-state electron configuration of a molecule is deduced by using the building-up principle to accommodate all the valence electrons in the available molecular orbitals. The bond order is the net number of bonds that hold the molecule together. 

On account of the quenching of the orbital mechanical and magnetic moment of atoms on bond formation, all electron-pair-bond complexes are to he represented as 27 states. 

Such an averaging effect of the transition energies of CrMo relative to Crj and Mo is intuitively understandable, as the electronic ground-states of Cr and Mo atoms are both nsHn — l)d and those of Cr and M02 are both considered to be lo-gj 17Tu4 2a-g 18,4. Furthermore, the Cr 4s, 3d and the Mo 5s, 4d atomic orbitals, considered to be the main contributors to the metal-metal bonding in Cr /CrMo/Mo, lu-e known to have similar energies. Further discussion of these bimetallics formed by cryophotoclustering methods will be found in Section III. 

Fig. 1 A schematic illustration of the in-phase and out-of-phase combinations of the atomic orbitals into the bonding and antibonding molecular orbitals, respectively. The dissociation limit of a H molecule corresponds to a pure diradical with degenerate singlet and triplet states...

To truly understand the geometry of bonds, we need to understand the geometry of these three different hybridization states. The hybridization state of an atom describes the type of hybridized atomic orbitals (ip, sp, or sp) that contain the valence electrons. Each hybridized orbital can be used either to form a bond with another atom or to hold a lone pair. 

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