What is a chemical bond?

Chemical bonds are what hold atoms together to form molecules and extended solids. Chemists talk about bonds all the time, and draw pictures of them as lines joining atom symbols. Teachers often identify them as the little sticks that connect the spheres that represent atoms in a plastic molecular model. But no one has ever seen a chemical bond, and there is no reason to believe that they really even exist as physical objects.It is more useful to regard a chemical bond as an effect that causes certain atoms to join together to form structures that have unique physical and chemical properties. The forces that hold bonded atoms together are basically just the same kinds of electrostatic attractionsthat bind the electrons of an atom to its positively-charged nucleus.

Even at the end of the 19th century, when compounds and their formulas had long been in use, some prominent chemists doubted that molecules (or atoms) were any more than a convenient model. Molecules suddenly became real in 1905, when Albert Einstein showed that Brownian motion, the irregularmicroscopic movements oftiny pollen grains floating in water, could be directly attributed to collisions with molecule-sized particles.

Most people think of molecules as the particles that result when atoms become joined together in some way. A molecule can be defined as an aggregateof atoms that possesses distinctiveobservable properties. A particular kind of molecule is defined by its structure. In its most fundamental sense, the structure of a molecule is specified by the identity of its constituentatoms and the sequence in which they are joined together, that is, by the bonding connectivity. This defines the bonding geometry— the spatial relationship between the bonded atoms. The importance of bonding connectivity is illustrated by the structures of the two compounds ethanol and dimethyl ether, both of which have the simplest formula C₂H₆O.

Chemical species are traditionally represented by structural formulas such as the one for ascorbic acid (vitamin C) which we show here.

The lines represent the "chemical bonds" of the molecule. When we talk about the properties of a particular chemical bond, we are really discussing the relationship between two adjacent atoms that are part of the molecule. Diatomic molecules are of course the easiest to study. The information we derive from them helps us interpret various kinds of experiments we carry out on more complicated molecules.

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