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What you will learn in Chemical Bonding
1. Why Atoms Bond
Atoms bond to reach a full outer shell — the octet rule.
2. Ionic Bonding
A metal transfers electrons to a nonmetal — both end up with a full outer shell.
3. Covalent Bonding
Two nonmetals share electron pairs instead of transferring them.
4. Bond Polarity
Electronegativity difference decides nonpolar, polar, or ionic.
5. Metallic Bonding
Every atom in the lattice pools its valence electrons into a shared, delocalized sea instead of transferring or sharing with one partner.
6. Intermolecular Forces
Forces between separate molecules — hydrogen bonding, dipole-dipole, and London dispersion — are much weaker than the covalent/ionic/metallic bonds within a molecule or lattice.
7. Lewis Structures
Full dot-and-line structures show both bonding pairs and lone pairs, not just the electrons directly involved in a bond.
8. Coordinate Bonds
A lone pair can form a new bond by donating both electrons at once, instead of the usual one-from-each covalent sharing.
9. Bond Energy
Potential energy vs. internuclear distance: the well's depth is the bond energy, its minimum is the bond length.
10. VSEPR Geometry
Electron domains — bonding pairs and lone pairs alike — repel each other and spread out as far as geometry allows, deciding a molecule's shape.
11. Molecular Orbitals
Atomic orbitals combine into bonding and antibonding molecular orbitals — a model that predicts bond order like Lewis structures do, but also explains things Lewis structures can't, like O2's paramagnetism.
12. Crystal Lattice
Zooming out from a single ion pair to the full repeating 3D lattice reveals coordination number — how many nearest neighbors of the opposite charge surround each ion.