The valence is the combining capacity of an atom of a given element, determined by the number of hydrogen atoms that it combines with. In methane, carbon has a valence of 4; in ammonia, nitrogen has a valence of 3; in water, oxygen has a valence of 2; and in hydrogen chloride, chlorine has a valence of 1. Chlorine, as it has a valence of one, can be substituted for hydrogen in many compounds. Phosphorus has a valence 3 in phosphine (PH3) and a valence of 5 in phosphorus pentachloride (PCl5), which shows that an element may exhibit more than one valence. The structural formula of a compound represents the connectivity of the atoms, with lines drawn between two atoms to represent bonds.[1] The two tables below show examples of different compounds, their structural formulas, and the valences for each element of the compound.
The maximum number of univalent atoms (originally hydrogen or chlorine atoms) that may combine with an atom of the element under consideration, or with a fragment, or for which an atom of this element can be substituted.
The number of hydrogen atoms that can combine with an element in a binary hydride or twice the number of oxygen atoms combining with an element in its oxide or oxides.
This definition differs from the IUPAC definition as an element can be said to have more than one valence.
Historical development
The etymology of the words valence (plural valences) and valency (plural valencies) traces back to 1425, meaning "extract, preparation", from Latin valentia "strength, capacity", from the earlier valor "worth, value", and the chemical meaning referring to the "combining power of an element" is recorded from 1884, from German Valenz.[4]
In 1789, William Higgins published views on what he called combinations of "ultimate" particles, which foreshadowed the concept of valency bonds.[5] If, for example, according to Higgins, the force between the ultimate particle of oxygen and the ultimate particle of nitrogen were 6, then the strength of the force would be divided accordingly, and likewise for the other combinations of ultimate particles (see illustration).
The exact inception, however, of the theory of chemical valencies can be traced to an 1852 paper by Edward Frankland, in which he combined the older radical theory with thoughts on chemical affinity to show that certain elements have the tendency to combine with other elements to form compounds containing 3, i.e., in the 3-atom groups (e.g., NO3, NH3, NI3, etc.) or 5, i.e., in the 5-atom groups (e.g., NO5, NH4O, PO5, etc.), equivalents of the attached elements. According to him, this is the manner in which their affinities are best satisfied, and by following these examples and postulates, he declares how obvious it is that[6]
A tendency or law prevails (here), and that, no matter what the characters of the uniting atoms may be, the combining power of the attracting element, if I may be allowed the term, is always satisfied by the same number of these atoms.
This "combining power" was afterwards called quantivalence or valency (and valence by American chemists).[5] In 1857 August Kekulé proposed fixed valences for many elements, such as 4 for carbon, and used them to propose structural formulas for many organic molecules, which are still accepted today.
Lothar Meyer in his 1864 book, Die modernen Theorien der Chemie, contained an early version of the periodic table containing 28 elements, for the first time classified elements into six families by their valence. Works on organizing the elements by atomic weight, until then had been stymied by the widespread use of equivalent weights for the elements, rather than atomic weights.[7]
Most 19th-century chemists defined the valence of an element as the number of its bonds without distinguishing different types of valence or of bond. However, in 1893 Alfred Werner described transition metalcoordination complexes such as [Co(NH3)6]Cl3, in which he distinguished principal and subsidiary valences (German: 'Hauptvalenz' and 'Nebenvalenz'), corresponding to the modern concepts of oxidation state and coordination number respectively.
For main-group elements, in 1904 Richard Abegg considered positive and negative valences (maximal and minimal oxidation states), and proposed Abegg's rule to the effect that their difference is often 8.
An alternative definition of valence, developed in the 1920's and having modern proponents, differs in cases where an atom's formal charge is not zero. It defines the valence of a given atom in a covalent molecule as the number of electrons that an atom has used in bonding:[8][9][10][11]
valence = number of electrons in valence shell of free atom − number of non-bonding electrons on atom in molecule,
or equivalently:
valence = number of bonds + formal charge.
In this convention, the nitrogen in an ammonium ion [NH4]+ bonds to four hydrogen atoms, but it is considered to be pentavalent because all five of nitrogen's valence electrons participate in the bonding.[8]
Electrons and valence
The Rutherford model of the nuclear atom (1911) showed that the exterior of an atom is occupied by electrons, which suggests that electrons are responsible for the interaction of atoms and the formation of chemical bonds. In 1916, Gilbert N. Lewis explained valence and chemical bonding in terms of a tendency of (main-group) atoms to achieve a stable octet of 8 valence-shell electrons. According to Lewis, covalent bonding leads to octets by the sharing of electrons, and ionic bonding leads to octets by the transfer of electrons from one atom to the other. The term covalence is attributed to Irving Langmuir, who stated in 1919 that "the number of pairs of electrons which any given atom shares with the adjacent atoms is called the covalence of that atom".[12] The prefix co- means "together", so that a co-valent bond means that the atoms share a valence. Subsequent to that, it is now more common to speak of covalent bonds rather than valence, which has fallen out of use in higher-level work from the advances in the theory of chemical bonding, but it is still widely used in elementary studies, where it provides a heuristic introduction to the subject.
In the 1930s, Linus Pauling proposed that there are also polar covalent bonds, which are intermediate between covalent and ionic, and that the degree of ionic character depends on the difference of electronegativity of the two bonded atoms.
Pauling also considered hypervalent molecules, in which main-group elements have apparent valences greater than the maximal of 4 allowed by the octet rule. For example, in the sulfur hexafluoride molecule (SF6), Pauling considered that the sulfur forms 6 true two-electron bonds using sp3d2hybrid atomic orbitals, which combine one s, three p and two d orbitals. However more recently, quantum-mechanical calculations on this and similar molecules have shown that the role of d orbitals in the bonding is minimal, and that the SF6 molecule should be described as having 6 polar covalent (partly ionic) bonds made from only four orbitals on sulfur (one s and three p) in accordance with the octet rule, together with six orbitals on the fluorines.[13] Similar calculations on transition-metal molecules show that the role of p orbitals is minor, so that one s and five d orbitals on the metal are sufficient to describe the bonding.[14]
Many elements have a common valence related to their position in the periodic table, and nowadays this is rationalised by the octet rule. The Greek/Latin numeral prefixes (mono-/uni-, di-/bi-, tri-/ter-, and so on) are used to describe ions in the charge states 1, 2, 3, and so on, respectively. Polyvalence or multivalence refers to species that are not restricted to a specific number of valence bonds. Species with a single charge are univalent (monovalent). For example, the Cs+cation is a univalent or monovalent cation, whereas the Ca2+ cation is a divalent cation, and the Fe3+ cation is a trivalent cation. Unlike Cs and Ca, Fe can also exist in other charge states, notably 2+ and 4+, and is thus known as a multivalent (polyvalent) ion.[15] Transition metals and metals to the right are typically multivalent but there is no simple pattern predicting their valency.[16]
† The same adjectives are also used in medicine to refer to vaccine valence, with the slight difference that in the latter sense, quadri- is more common than tetra-.
‡ As demonstrated by hit counts in Google web search and Google Books search corpora (accessed 2017).
§ A few other forms can be found in large English-language corpora (for example, *quintavalent, *quintivalent, *decivalent), but they are not the conventionally established forms in English and thus are not entered in major dictionaries.
Valence versus oxidation state
Because of the ambiguity of the term valence,[17] other notations are currently preferred. Beside the lambda notation, as used in the IUPAC nomenclature of inorganic chemistry,[18]oxidation state is a more clear indication of the electronic state of atoms in a molecule.
The oxidation state of an atom in a molecule gives the number of valence electrons it has gained or lost.[19] In contrast to the valency number, the oxidation state can be positive (for an electropositive atom) or negative (for an electronegative atom).
Elements in a high oxidation state have an oxidation state higher than +4, and also, elements in a high valence state (hypervalent elements) have a valence higher than 4. For example, in perchloratesClO−4, chlorine has 7 valence bonds (thus, it is heptavalent, in other words, it has valence 7), and it has oxidation state +7; in ruthenium tetroxideRuO4, ruthenium has 8 valence bonds (thus, it is octavalent, in other words, it has valence 8), and it has oxidation state +8.
In some molecules, there is a difference between valence and oxidation state for a given atom. For example, in disulfur decafluoride molecule S2F10, each sulfur atom has 6 valence bonds (5 single bonds with fluorine atoms and 1 single bond with the other sulfur atom). Thus, each sulfur atom is hexavalent or has valence 6, but has oxidation state +5. In the dioxygen molecule O2, each oxygen atom has 2 valence bonds and so is divalent (valence 2), but has oxidation state 0. In acetyleneH−C≡C−H, each carbon atom has 4 valence bonds (1 single bond with hydrogen atom and a triple bond with the other carbon atom). Each carbon atom is tetravalent (valence 4), but has oxidation state −1.
Examples
Variation of valence vs oxidation state for bonds between two different elements
* The perchlorate ion ClO−4 is monovalent, in other words, it has valence 1. ** Valences may also be different from absolute values of oxidation states due to different polarity of bonds. For example, in dichloromethane, CH2Cl2, carbon has valence 4 but oxidation state 0. *** Iron oxides appear in a crystal structure, so no typical molecule can be identified. In ferrous oxide, Fe has oxidation state +2; in ferric oxide, oxidation state +3.
Variation of valence vs oxidation state for bonds between two atoms of the same element
Frankland took the view that the valence (he used the term "atomicity") of an element was a single value that corresponded to the maximum value observed. The number of unused valencies on atoms of what are now called the p-block elements is generally even, and Frankland suggested that the unused valencies saturated one another. For example, nitrogen has a maximum valence of 5, in forming ammonia two valencies are left unattached; sulfur has a maximum valence of 6, in forming hydrogen sulphide four valencies are left unattached.[20][21]
The maximum number of univalent atoms (originally hydrogen or chlorine atoms) that may combine with an atom of the element under consideration, or with a fragment, or for which an atom of this element can be substituted.[2]
Hydrogen and chlorine were originally used as examples of univalent atoms, because of their nature to form only one single bond. Hydrogen has only one valence electron and can form only one bond with an atom that has an incomplete outer shell. Chlorine has seven valence electrons and can form only one bond with an atom that donates a valence electron to complete chlorine's outer shell. However, chlorine can also have oxidation states from +1 to +7 and can form more than one bond by donating valence electrons.
Hydrogen has only one valence electron, but it can form bonds with more than one atom. In the bifluoride ion ([HF2]−), for example, it forms a three-center four-electron bond with two fluoride atoms:
Maximum valences for the elements are based on the data from list of oxidation states of the elements. They are shown by the color code at the bottom of the table.
A chemical bond is a lasting attraction between atoms or ions that enables the formation of molecules, crystals, and other structures. The bond may result from the electrostatic force between oppositely charged ions as in ionic bonds, or through the sharing of electrons as in covalent bonds. The strength of chemical bonds varies considerably: there are "strong bonds" or "primary bonds" such as covalent, ionic and metallic bonds, and "weak bonds" or "secondary bonds" such as dipole–dipole interactions, the London dispersion force, and hydrogen bonding.
A covalent bond is a chemical bond that involves the sharing of electrons to form electron pairs between atoms. These electron pairs are known as shared pairs or bonding pairs. The stable balance of attractive and repulsive forces between atoms, when they share electrons, is known as covalent bonding. For many molecules, the sharing of electrons allows each atom to attain the equivalent of a full valence shell, corresponding to a stable electronic configuration. In organic chemistry, covalent bonding is much more common than ionic bonding.
Electronegativity, symbolized as χ, is the tendency for an atom of a given chemical element to attract shared electrons when forming a chemical bond. An atom's electronegativity is affected by both its atomic number and the distance at which its valence electrons reside from the charged nucleus. The higher the associated electronegativity, the more an atom or a substituent group attracts electrons. Electronegativity serves as a simple way to quantitatively estimate the bond energy, and the sign and magnitude of a bond's chemical polarity, which characterizes a bond along the continuous scale from covalent to ionic bonding. The loosely defined term electropositivity is the opposite of electronegativity: it characterizes an element's tendency to donate valence electrons.
In chemistry, electron counting is a formalism for assigning a number of valence electrons to individual atoms in a molecule. It is used for classifying compounds and for explaining or predicting their electronic structure and bonding. Many rules in chemistry rely on electron-counting:
Ionic bonding is a type of chemical bonding that involves the electrostatic attraction between oppositely charged ions, or between two atoms with sharply different electronegativities, and is the primary interaction occurring in ionic compounds. It is one of the main types of bonding, along with covalent bonding and metallic bonding. Ions are atoms with an electrostatic charge. Atoms that gain electrons make negatively charged ions. Atoms that lose electrons make positively charged ions. This transfer of electrons is known as electrovalence in contrast to covalence. In the simplest case, the cation is a metal atom and the anion is a nonmetal atom, but these ions can be more complex, e.g. molecular ions like NH+ 4 or SO2− 4. In simpler words, an ionic bond results from the transfer of electrons from a metal to a non-metal to obtain a full valence shell for both atoms.
The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, arranges the chemical elements into rows ("periods") and columns ("groups"). It is an icon of chemistry and is widely used in physics and other sciences. It is a depiction of the periodic law, which states that when the elements are arranged in order of their atomic numbers an approximate recurrence of their properties is evident. The table is divided into four roughly rectangular areas called blocks. Elements in the same group tend to show similar chemical characteristics.
In atomic physics and quantum chemistry, the electron configuration is the distribution of electrons of an atom or molecule in atomic or molecular orbitals. For example, the electron configuration of the neon atom is 1s2 2s2 2p6, meaning that the 1s, 2s and 2p subshells are occupied by 2, 2 and 6 electrons respectively.
The octet rule is a chemical rule of thumb that reflects the theory that main-group elements tend to bond in such a way that each atom has eight electrons in its valence shell, giving it the same electronic configuration as a noble gas. The rule is especially applicable to carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and the halogens; although more generally the rule is applicable for the s-block and p-block of the periodic table. Other rules exist for other elements, such as the duplet rule for hydrogen and helium, and the 18-electron rule for transition metals.
In chemistry, resonance, also called mesomerism, is a way of describing bonding in certain molecules or polyatomic ions by the combination of several contributing structures into a resonance hybrid in valence bond theory. It has particular value for analyzing delocalized electrons where the bonding cannot be expressed by one single Lewis structure. The resonance hybrid is the accurate structure for a molecule or ion; it is an average of the theoretical contributing structures.
Lewis structures – also called Lewis dot formulas, Lewis dot structures, electron dot structures, or Lewis electron dot structures (LEDs) – are diagrams that show the bonding between atoms of a molecule, as well as the lone pairs of electrons that may exist in the molecule. A Lewis structure can be drawn for any covalently bonded molecule, as well as coordination compounds. The Lewis structure was named after Gilbert N. Lewis, who introduced it in his 1916 article The Atom and the Molecule. Lewis structures extend the concept of the electron dot diagram by adding lines between atoms to represent shared pairs in a chemical bond.
In chemistry and physics, valence electrons are electrons in the outermost shell of an atom, and that can participate in the formation of a chemical bond if the outermost shell is not closed. In a single covalent bond, a shared pair forms with both atoms in the bond each contributing one valence electron.
The skeletal formula, line-angle formula, or shorthand formula of an organic compound is a type of molecular structural formula that serves as a shorthand representation of a molecule's bonding and some details of its molecular geometry. A skeletal formula shows the skeletal structure or skeleton of a molecule, which is composed of the skeletal atoms that make up the molecule. It is represented in two dimensions, as on a piece of paper. It employs certain conventions to represent carbon and hydrogen atoms, which are the most common in organic chemistry.
In chemistry, valence bond (VB) theory is one of the two basic theories, along with molecular orbital (MO) theory, that were developed to use the methods of quantum mechanics to explain chemical bonding. It focuses on how the atomic orbitals of the dissociated atoms combine to give individual chemical bonds when a molecule is formed. In contrast, molecular orbital theory has orbitals that cover the whole molecule.
The inert-pair effect is the tendency of the two electrons in the outermost atomic s-orbital to remain unshared in compounds of post-transition metals. The term inert-pair effect is often used in relation to the increasing stability of oxidation states that are two less than the group valency for the heavier elements of groups 13, 14, 15 and 16. The term "inert pair" was first proposed by Nevil Sidgwick in 1927. The name suggests that the outermost s electron pairs are more tightly bound to the nucleus in these atoms, and therefore more difficult to ionize or share.
In chemistry, a hypervalent molecule is a molecule that contains one or more main group elements apparently bearing more than eight electrons in their valence shells. Phosphorus pentachloride, sulfur hexafluoride, chlorine trifluoride, the chlorite ion, and the triiodide ion are examples of hypervalent molecules.
In chemistry, orbital hybridisation is the concept of mixing atomic orbitals to form new hybrid orbitals suitable for the pairing of electrons to form chemical bonds in valence bond theory. For example, in a carbon atom which forms four single bonds the valence-shell s orbital combines with three valence-shell p orbitals to form four equivalent sp3 mixtures in a tetrahedral arrangement around the carbon to bond to four different atoms. Hybrid orbitals are useful in the explanation of molecular geometry and atomic bonding properties and are symmetrically disposed in space. Usually hybrid orbitals are formed by mixing atomic orbitals of comparable energies.
In chemistry, bond order is a formal measure of the multiplicity of a covalent bond between two atoms. As introduced by Linus Pauling, bond order is defined as the difference between the numbers of electron pairs in bonding and antibonding molecular orbitals.
The 3-center 4-electron (3c–4e) bond is a model used to explain bonding in certain hypervalent molecules such as tetratomic and hexatomic interhalogen compounds, sulfur tetrafluoride, the xenon fluorides, and the bifluoride ion. It is also known as the Pimentel–Rundle three-center model after the work published by George C. Pimentel in 1951, which built on concepts developed earlier by Robert E. Rundle for electron-deficient bonding. An extended version of this model is used to describe the whole class of hypervalent molecules such as phosphorus pentafluoride and sulfur hexafluoride as well as multi-center π-bonding such as ozone and sulfur trioxide.
A chemical compound is a chemical substance composed of many identical molecules containing atoms from more than one chemical element held together by chemical bonds. A molecule consisting of atoms of only one element is therefore not a compound. A compound can be transformed into a different substance by a chemical reaction, which may involve interactions with other substances. In this process, bonds between atoms may be broken and/or new bonds formed.
Linnett double-quartet theory (LDQ) is a method of describing the bonding in molecules which involves separating the electrons depending on their spin, placing them into separate 'spin tetrahedra' to minimise the Pauli repulsions between electrons of the same spin. Introduced by J. W. Linnett in his 1961 monograph and 1964 book, this method expands on the electron dot structures pioneered by G. N. Lewis. While the theory retains the requirement for fulfilling the octet rule, it dispenses with the need to force electrons into coincident pairs. Instead, the theory stipulates that the four electrons of a given spin should maximise the distances between each other, resulting in a net tetrahedral electronic arrangement that is the fundamental molecular building block of the theory.
↑ Frankland, E. (1852). "On a New Series of Organic Bodies Containing Metals". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 142: 417–444. doi:10.1098/rstl.1852.0020. S2CID186210604.
↑ Alan J. Rocke (1984). Chemical Atomism in the Nineteenth Century: From Dalton to Cannizzaro. Ohio State University Press.
1 2 Parkin, Gerard (May 2006). "Valence, Oxidation Number, and Formal Charge: Three Related but Fundamentally Different Concepts". Journal of Chemical Education. 83 (5): 791. doi:10.1021/ed083p791. ISSN0021-9584. While the concepts and definitions of valence have been refined over the years, that described by Sidgwick remains the most useful and simple definition for covalent molecules: the valence of an atom in a covalent molecule is simply the number of electrons that an atom has used in bonding.
↑ Sidgwick, N. V. (1927). The electronic theory of valency. London: Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press). p.199. On the whole the best definition of absolute valency seems to be that adopted by Grimm and Sommerfeld, that it is numerically equal to the number of electrons of the atom 'engaged' (beansprucht) in attaching the other atoms.
↑ Magnusson, Eric (1990). "Hypercoordinate molecules of second-row elements: d functions or d orbitals?". J. Am. Chem. Soc. 112 (22): 7940–7951. doi:10.1021/ja00178a014.
↑ Frenking, Gernot; Shaik, Sason, eds. (May 2014). "Chapter 7: Chemical bonding in Transition Metal Compounds". The Chemical Bond: Chemical Bonding Across the Periodic Table. Wiley – VCH. ISBN978-3-527-33315-8.
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