Archive for February, 2022

Chasing ever higher bond orders; the strange case of beryllium.

Monday, February 7th, 2022

Ever since the concept of a shared two-electron bond was conjured by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1916,[1] chemists have been fascinated by the related concept of a bond order (the number of such bonds that two atoms can participate in, however a bond is defined) and pushing it ever higher for pairs of like-atoms. Lewis first showed in 1916[1] how two carbon atoms could share two, four or six electrons to achieve a bond order of up to three. It took quite a few decades for this to be extended to four for carbon (and nitrogen) and that only with some measure of controversy and dispute (for one recent brief summary, see[2]).

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References

  1. G.N. Lewis, "THE ATOM AND THE MOLECULE.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 38, pp. 762-785, 1916. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja02261a002
  2. H.S. Rzepa, "Routes involving no free C2 in a DFT-computed mechanistic model for the reported room-temperature chemical synthesis of C2", Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, vol. 23, pp. 12630-12636, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/D1CP02056K