Hybridisation

Today I want to talk about hybrid orbitals. I always used to wonder how they were made and why their name was derived from the greek word for mixing. Now I know that they are nothing but mathematical linear combinations of the original orbitals. I am not going to talk much about theory though because I think that most people who are interested in it already looked it up somewhere. What I want to show now, is a little visualisation of the orbitals. It is supposed to show how a hybrid orbital is made of the 2s and 2p orbitals.

First I was going to make a moving gif. But then I remembered that I hate moving gifs and everything else, moving on my sreen without me asking it to. Actually I don't think I could enjoy the internet without AdBlock. It lets me block out the ads that catch my attention by being most annoying.

So I decided to make this in JavaScript. I found out that Blogspot doesn't support JavaScript. Because of that you have to click on the image first before you can change it.

By clicking the left single arrow you can increase the s-character of the orbital, by clicking the double arrow it is increased automatically. The right arrows work the other way, you go toward the p-orbital.



I hope you can enjoy this as much as I enjoyed making it. You can see how the electron density is transferred to one side giving the possibility for a big overlap with an orbital from a different atom.

The pictures were drawn in Mathematica which is a really nice but also expensive program.