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In chemistry, delocalized electrons are electrons in a molecule, ion or solid metal that are not associated with a single atom or a covalent bond. [1] The term delocalization is general and can have slightly different meanings in different fields: In organic chemistry, it refers to resonance in conjugated systems and aromatic compounds.
Standard ab initio quantum chemistry methods lead to delocalized orbitals that, in general, extend over an entire molecule and have the symmetry of the molecule. Localized orbitals may then be found as linear combinations of the delocalized orbitals, given by an appropriate unitary transformation.
Benzene, the most widely recognized aromatic compound with six delocalized π-electrons (4n + 2, for n = 1). In organic chemistry, Hückel's rule predicts that a planar ring molecule will have aromatic properties if it has 4n + 2 π-electrons, where n is a non-negative integer.
Contributing structures of the carbonate ion. 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 (or forms, [1] also variously known as resonance structures or canonical structures) into a resonance hybrid (or hybrid structure) in valence bond theory.
However, in benzene the remaining six bonding electrons are located in three π (pi) molecular bonding orbitals that are delocalized around the ring. Two of these electrons are in an MO that has equal orbital contributions from all six atoms. The other four electrons are in orbitals with vertical nodes at right angles to each other.
In fully delocalized canonical molecular orbital theory, it is often the case that none of the molecular orbitals of a molecule are strictly non-bonding in nature. However, in the context of localized molecular orbitals, the concept of a filled, non-bonding orbital tends to correspond to electrons described in Lewis structure terms as "lone pairs."
The bond order is equal to the number of bonding electrons minus the number of antibonding electrons, divided by 2. In this example, there are 2 electrons in the bonding orbital and none in the antibonding orbital; the bond order is 1, and there is a single bond between the two hydrogen atoms. [citation needed]
The presence of such bands allows electrons in metals to behave as if they were free or delocalized electrons. These electrons are not associated with specific atoms, so when an electric field is applied, they are free to move like a gas (called Fermi gas) [137] through the material much like free electrons.