Orbital overlap

This article may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help by adding relevant internal links, or by improving the article's layout. (January 2011) Click [show] on right for more details. No reason has been cited for the Wikify tag on this article. Please replace HTML markup with wiki markup where appropriate. Add wikilinks. Where appropriate, make links to other articles by putting "[[" and "]]" on either side of relevant words (see WP:LINK for more information) and check that your links work as expected. Please do not link terms that most readers are familiar with, such as common occupations, well-known geographical terms, and everyday items. Format the lead. Create or improve the lead paragraph. Arrange section headers as described at Wikipedia:Guide to layout. Add an infobox if it is appropriate for the article. Remove this tag.

Orbital overlap was an idea first introduced by Linus Pauling to explain the molecular bond angles observed through experimentation and is the basis for the concept of orbital hybridisation. s orbitals are spherical and have no directionality while p orbitals are oriented 90° to one another. A theory was needed therefore to explain why molecules such as methane (CH₄) had observed bond angles of 109.5°.^[1] Pauling's theory was that bonds are created by the overlap of adjacent atomic orbitals of two atoms. The greater the overlap of the two orbitals, the stronger the bond. The resulting bond is known as an sp hybrid and it exhibits strength greater than that of an s or p orbital.^[2]

Sources

1. ^ Anslyn, Eric V./Dougherty, Dennis A. (2006). Modern Physical Organic Chemistry. University Science Books.
2. ^ Pauling, Linus. (1960). The Nature Of The Chemical Bond. Cornell University Press.

This chemistry-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v d e