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2 molecule is referred to as triplet oxygen. [35] [b] The highest-energy, partially filled orbitals are antibonding, and so their filling weakens the bond order from three to two. Because of its unpaired electrons, triplet oxygen reacts only slowly with most organic molecules, which have paired electron spins; this prevents spontaneous ...
The unpaired electrons participate in three-electron bonding, shown here using dashed lines. The common allotrope of elemental oxygen on Earth, O 2, is generally known as oxygen, but may be called dioxygen, diatomic oxygen, molecular oxygen, dioxidene or oxygen gas to distinguish it from the element itself and from the triatomic allotrope ozone ...
Triplet oxygen, 3 O 2, refers to the S = 1 electronic ground state of molecular oxygen (dioxygen). Molecules of triplet oxygen contain two unpaired electrons, making triplet oxygen an unusual example of a stable and commonly encountered diradical : [ 2 ] it is more stable as a triplet than a singlet .
The electrons shared by the two atoms in a covalent bond are counted twice, once for each atom. In carbon dioxide each oxygen shares four electrons with the central carbon, two (shown in red) from the oxygen itself and two (shown in black) from the carbon.
In this molecule, 24 of the 30 total valence bonding electrons – 24 coming from carbon atoms and 6 coming from hydrogen atoms – are located in 12 σ (sigma) bonding orbitals, which are located mostly between pairs of atoms (C–C or C–H), similarly to the electrons in the valence bond description.
The oxygen molecule is a stable diradical, best represented by • O–O •. Because spins of the electrons are parallel, this molecule is stable. While the ground state of oxygen is this unreactive spin-unpaired ( triplet ) diradical, an extremely reactive spin-paired ( singlet ) state is available.
The molecule, therefore, has two unpaired electrons and is in a triplet state. In contrast, the first and second excited states of dioxygen are both states of singlet oxygen. Each has two electrons of opposite spin in the π* level so that S = 0 and the multiplicity is 2S + 1 = 1 in consequence.
Its bulk properties partly result from the interaction of its component atoms, oxygen and hydrogen, with atoms of nearby water molecules. Hydrogen atoms are covalently bonded to oxygen in a water molecule but also have an additional attraction (about 23.3 kJ·mol −1 per hydrogen atom) to an adjacent oxygen atom in a separate molecule. [2]