Advance Offers New Opportunities İn Chemistry Education, Research

Researchers at Oregon State University have created a new, unifying method to describe a basic chemical concept called "electronegativity," first described almost 80 years ago by OSU alumnus Linus Pauling and part of the work that led to his receiving the Nobel Prize. The new system offers simplicity of understanding that should rewrite high school and college chemistry textbooks around the world, even as it opens important new avenues in materials and chemical research, with possible applications in everything from solar energy to solid state batteries.

The findings were just published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, in work supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

"This is a quantum leap forward in understanding basic tendencies in chemical bond formation," said John Wager, a professor of electrical engineering at OSU. "We can now take a concept that college students struggle with and I could explain it to a kindergarten class.

"Even advanced scientists will gain new insights and understanding into the chemical processes they study," Wager said. "Using this system, I could look at various materials being considered for use in new solar energy cells and determine quickly that this one might work, that one doesn't stand a chance."

Electronegativity, as defined by Pauling, is "the power of an atom in a molecule to attract electrons to itself." This concept is useful for explaining why some atoms tend to attract electrons, others share them and some give them away. In the 1930s, Pauling was the first to devise a method for numerically estimating the electronegativity of an atom. Other researchers later developed different approaches.