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Ionic radius, r ion, is the radius of a monatomic ion in an ionic crystal structure. Although neither atoms nor ions have sharp boundaries, they are treated as if they were hard spheres with radii such that the sum of ionic radii of the cation and anion gives the distance between the ions in a crystal lattice .
For more recent data on covalent radii see Covalent radius. Just as atomic units are given in terms of the atomic mass unit (approximately the proton mass), the physically appropriate unit of length here is the Bohr radius, which is the radius of a hydrogen atom. The Bohr radius is consequently known as the "atomic unit of length".
In inorganic chemistry, Fajans' rules, formulated by Kazimierz Fajans in 1923, [1] [2] [3] are used to predict whether a chemical bond will be covalent or ionic, and depend on the charge on the cation and the relative sizes of the cation and anion. They can be summarized in the following table:
For typical ionic solids, the cations are smaller than the anions, and each cation is surrounded by coordinated anions which form a polyhedron.The sum of the ionic radii determines the cation-anion distance, while the cation-anion radius ratio + / (or /) determines the coordination number (C.N.) of the cation, as well as the shape of the coordinated polyhedron of anions.
In condensed matter physics and inorganic chemistry, the cation-anion radius ratio can be used to predict the crystal structure of an ionic compound based on the relative size of its atoms. It is defined as the ratio of the ionic radius of the positively charged cation to the ionic radius of the negatively charged anion in a cation-anion compound.
The atomic radius of a chemical element is a measure of the size of its atom, usually the mean or typical distance from the center of the nucleus to the outermost isolated electron. Since the boundary is not a well-defined physical entity, there are various non-equivalent definitions of atomic radius.
The circumstances under which a compound will have ionic or covalent character can typically be understood using Fajans' rules, which use only charges and the sizes of each ion. According to these rules, compounds with the most ionic character will have large positive ions with a low charge, bonded to a small negative ion with a high charge. [25]
The strength of the M-O bond tends to increase with the charge and decrease as the size of the metal ion increases. In fact there is a very good linear correlation between hydration enthalpy and the ratio of charge squared to ionic radius, z 2 /r. [4] For ions in solution Shannon's "effective ionic radius" is the measure most often used. [5]