Solids: Thermodynamics and Bonding

METALLIC BONDING

· Metallic bonding can be thought of as "Time-shared" covalency due to wave functions which overlap several ion-cores in the condensed phase.

· Lithium may be considered as a prototype metal and has the electronic configuration: (1s)²(2s)¹ . The electron distributions are shown in the diagram.
· The solid has a bcc structure with 8 nearest-neighbor atoms and 6 next-nearest-neighbor atoms for each lattice atom.
· The nearest neighbors are at 0.3 nm and the next nearest neighbors at 0.33 nm from the reference atom. The 2s electron distribution overlaps both these locations.

From: Sproull, "Modern Physics," Wiley (1956)