Publisher Summary
Once upon a time, it was believed that the structures of most binary solid compounds of the metals, other than alloys and related substances, could be described adequately in terms of an ionic model, in which metal ions and anions are treated as charged more or less compressible spheres. This model leads to a classical electrostatic theory of bonding and is relatively well understood. Naturally, modern developments in valency theory have tended to emphasize those situations, in which a simple ionic theory is inadequate and so have occasionally led to the multiplication of hypotheses to explain observations, which could just as well be interpreted in terms of an electrostatic theory. This has tended to obscure the fact that the ionic model still forms satisfactory background to a great part of the theory of the stereochemistry of metal compounds. In this review, one shall emphasize the ionic viewpoint, but not because one is unaware of the importance of covalent bonding. In this chapter, it is believed that only after the irrelevance of much, that has been presented as qualitative stereochemical evidence for covalency has been appreciated, does the importance of quantitative studies, for example, of unpaired electron distributions by paramagnetic resonance experiments, become clear.
Reference: http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/S0065279208601867
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