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Atoms that lose electrons make positively charged ions (called cations). 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 +
Electrostatic potential map of a water molecule, where the oxygen atom has a more negative charge (red) than the positive (blue) hydrogen atoms. Electronegativity, symbolized as χ, is the tendency for an atom of a given chemical element to attract shared electrons (or electron density) when forming a chemical bond. [1]
Not all atoms attract electrons with the same force. The amount of "pull" an atom exerts on its electrons is called its electronegativity.Atoms with high electronegativities – such as fluorine, oxygen, and nitrogen – exert a greater pull on electrons than atoms with lower electronegativities such as alkali metals and alkaline earth metals.
The bond results because the metal atoms become somewhat positively charged due to loss of their electrons while the electrons remain attracted to many atoms, without being part of any given atom. Metallic bonding may be seen as an extreme example of delocalization of electrons over a large system of covalent bonds, in which every atom ...
The net charge of an ion is not zero because its total number of electrons is unequal to its total number of protons. A cation is a positively charged ion with fewer electrons than protons [2] (e.g. K + (potassium ion)) while an anion is a negatively charged ion with more electrons than protons. [3] (e.g. Cl-(chloride ion) and OH-(hydroxide ion)).
The hydrogen anion, with its loosely held two-electron cloud, has a larger radius than the neutral atom, which in turn is much larger than the bare proton of the cation. Hydrogen forms the only cation that has no electrons, but even cations that (unlike hydrogen) still retain one or more electrons are still smaller than the neutral atoms or ...
Electrons in an ionic bond tend to be mostly found around one of the two constituent atoms due to the large electronegativity difference between the two atoms, generally more than 1.9, (greater difference in electronegativity results in a stronger bond); this is often described as one atom giving electrons to the other. [5]
In chemistry, the oxidation state, or oxidation number, is the hypothetical charge of an atom if all of its bonds to other atoms were fully ionic. It describes the degree of oxidation (loss of electrons) of an atom in a chemical compound. Conceptually, the oxidation state may be positive, negative or zero.