[MUSIC] In this lecture I'll review

the driving forces for ion formation, and show how this was
translated into a set of rules for assigning oxidation states to
atoms in all kinds of compounds. Finally, we'll wrap up by talking about
some of the common polyatomic ions. Look at a periodic table now,
to remind yourself of a couple of periodic trends that have been
discussed in this course. One of the things you might
remember is that the metals have relatively small ionization energy. They tend to
lose electrons and
become cations because of this. Nonmetals on the other hand,
have relatively low energy open orbitals. Which means they have
large electronegativity. They tend to gain electrons, often by
taking those electrons away from metals, and the nonmetals tend to form anions. The
driving force, once again,
for these processes. Are that,
the system wants to lower its energy. So the electrons can go to lower energy
by leaving metals and joining nonmetals. Another driving force that you may have
heard about is that atoms of the main group elements want to become
isoelectronic with the noble gases. What do I mean by an atom becoming
isoelectronic with a noble gas? Well let's take a look at
the periodic table and see. This periodic table has drawn
hydrogen above the alkaline metals. I don't actually think that's
the best place for hydrogen. Sometimes it does loose an electron,
like in alkaline metals, but other times it doesn't. So the first thing I'm going
to do to
make the periodic table more the way I personally like it is move hydrogen. So you
see hydrogen there
is right above lithium. I'm just going to dissolve it away. Move it over here. You
know,
I like to put it kind of in the middle. Sometimes you see it above lithium. And
sometimes it's above fluorine. But, really it sometimes act like
a metal and sometimes like a nonmetal. So let's just put it in the middle. Shall
we? Okay, there it is. Now, let's look at
the main group elements. It's the main group elements that like to
be isoelectronic with the noble gasses. So what does this word isoelectronic mean?
That means it has the same
electron configuration, [SOUND] and we haven't talked
about electron configurations. We'll get to that later. But for now, let's just
say, it wants to have the same
number of electrons as a noble gas. [SOUND] So, for the main group elements,
that includes group one and two, remember? Does not include the transition metal.
So we're not going to talk
about those right now. I'm just going to cross 'em out. And I'm going to cross out
the. Lanthanide and
actinide are inter transition metals. But, it does include
also group 13 through 18. Okay, so
that's what I'm focusing on right now. Which of the noble gases over here, is
closest to the number
of electrons to lithium? Well helium is, right? Helium has two, so lithium,
can lose one of the three electrons, and become isoelectronic with helium. And
that's what lithium likes to do. In fact, everything in group one,
all of the alkaline metals, prefer to lose one electron,
they lose that electron quite easily. It's a very, it's a very low
ionization energy electron if you will. And they become isoelectronic with
noble gases by losing one electron. So sodium becomes isoelectronic with
neon when it's sodium one plus. The potassium cation is
isoelectronic with the argon. You see how that works? What do you think is true
about the
alkaline earth metals, that's group two. So beryllium is the,
the smallest alkaline earth metal. Again, it wants to be isoelectronic
with helium, so what does it need to do? Well, beryllium needs to
lose two electrons and that's what beryllium
does most of the time. So when beryllium loses two
electrons it has a plus two charge. Its most common oxidation
state is plus two, and it becomes isoelectronic with helium. Calcium, for example,
loses two electrons. So neutral calcium has 20. The most prevalent calcium cation
has
only 18 and is isoelectronic with argon. Do you see how that works? Now the
transition metals can gain or lose different numbers of electrons so
they're a little more interesting. Let's focus on things that
usually do the same thing. Let's jump over and look at the halogens that have
fluorine at
the top, so now we're looking at group 17. What's the easiest way for fluorine.
Let's in fact,
let's use green to outline these. What's the easiest way for
fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine to be isoelectronic
with the noble gases. Let's take iodine as an example. What does iodine need to do
to
become isoelectronic with xenon. Well it has 53 electrons and
xenon has 54, so it needs to gain one electron and that would make it
a minus one anion, wouldn't it? It becomes the iodide anion and
that's what the halogens most commonly do. I'm not going to worry too much
about what the metalloids do. So I'm going to draw a little
line like this, okay. And I'm also not going to worry too
much about what the late metals do. These metals down here were ten in nadar. You
see ten in nadar. Those are called the late metals. So we're not going to worry
about those right now either. because they also like
to do strange things. But let's focus now that we've
done the halogens let's do the next nonmetal column over. Let's do the column that
has
oxygen sulfur and selenium in it. And not worry about tellurium down
here because it's a metalloid. Well oxygen would like to
be isoelectronic with neon. Sulfur would like to be
isoelectronic with argon and selenium would like to gain two electrons
to become isoelectronic with krypton. You see that? So, all of those three elements
tend
to have the most common charge and their monatomic anion is minus two. Monatomic
meaning one atom, right? [SOUND] So the monatomic anion
common charges are drawn over here. Minus one and minus two for
those two groups. And the monatomic cations,
I'll just put in red over here. [SOUND] monatomic meaning one atom. Have a plus one
for the alkaline metals. A plus two charge for
the alkaline earth metals. And then actually we can jump
across the transition metals and find aluminum right here, which I sort
of crossed off but didn't mean to. Aluminum tends to have
a charge of plus three. It likes to lose all three
of it's electrons to become isoelectronic with neon. Okay, so
that's some common charges that occur. The driving force is that the nonmetals
like to gain electrons because of their high electronegativity. The cations prefer
to lose their electrons
because of their high energy electrons, and in both cases,
electrons are able to go to lower energy. Okay. So, electrons can leave the metal,
join the nonmetal. The metal becomes a cation. The nonmetal becomes an anion. All
of this is played out in this rule,
list of rules I'm about to give you for oxidation states. So, to treat compounds
in a systematic way. Conventions are used to
assign electron ownership for particular atoms in the compound. There have been two
major
systems devised for doing this and these are human constructs. One of the systems
is
called oxidation states and that's what we will be
talking about today. There's another system
called formal charge, which I actually really like, that gets
used quite a bit in organic chemistry. But, today, we're going to
learn about oxidation state. Because, that's the system
of accounting for electrons, that is used when
you name ionic compounds. So again, this is a human construct,
we decided to account this way. So this is just an electron
accounting system. And in the assignment of
oxidation states what we do is we're assuming
that all bonds are ionic. Even bonds that are not
ionic we assume are ionic. And in an ionic bond. All of the bonding electrons go to
the more electronegative atom, right? And an ionic bond, the electrons leave,
the highest energy electrons leave the less electronegative
element, which is usually a metal. There could be a nonmetal that has
relatively low electronegativity and they join the atom that
is more electronegative. So this is, this system of oxydation states is
treating most bonds as ionic bonds. The only bonds that get treated as
covalent bonds are bonds where the two atoms are the same type,
you'll see what I mean in a minute. Here's an interesting figure that shows
the electronegativities of some of the main group elements
on the polyne scale. We can use the difference in
electronegativity to determine which atoms would gain the electrons
in any particular compound. First, let's zero in on this figure. So make sure that
you
understand what's going on. Fluorine is the most
electronegative element, and it has an electronegativity of 4.0. If you compare
that to a metal,
for example, caesium, here is a large alkaline metal, and
it's electronegativity is only 0.7. All right? So, fluorine is much more likely to
take
electrons away from another atom than cesium is. Let's do a model compound. How
about,
what would happen if calcium and sulfur got together to make a compound. What would
the oxidation states, or
the charges on those monatomic ions be? So calcium is a metal? Let's just do this
is red, here's calcium. In order for
it to be isoelectronic with a noble gas, it wants to lose two of it's electron
to become isoelectronic with argon. Argon has 18 electrons. Calcium normally has 20
electrons. So it loses its two electrons, and
it gains or, it doesn't gain anything, it loses its two electrons to
become charged with plus two. And sulfur's over here. Sulfur has a higher
electronegativity. Sulfur's electronegativity is 2.5. So it's going to take the two
electrons
away from calcium and not give them back. So the sulfur ends up
with a minus two charge. Let's write that down over here so
we can see it clearly. I've got calcium with a positive two
charge and sulfur with a minus two charge. These numbers, two plus and
two minus, sorry, my minus is a little bit crooked there, those
are the oxidation states on those atoms. [SOUND] And
if I wanted to write what the compound is, the molecular formula,
the molecular formula is just. CaS, for calcium sulfide. I don't need to write the
charges, do I? But we know that the oxidation state
here of the calcium is plus two and the oxidation state of
the sulfur is minus two, okay. Because in this ionic compound, the sulfur has taken
both bonding
electrons from the calcium. One of the things we need to be
really careful about when we do oxidation state assignment,
is that we need to make sure that all the oxidation states together add up
to the net charge on the species. So here,
the net charge on calcium sulfide is zero. It has no charge overall. If I take the
oxidation states and
add them up, they should add up to zero. So I have plus two for calcium and
I'll add that with the oxidation state on the sulfur, which is minus two and
that does indeed add up to zero. So I'm in good shape,
works out just the way we need it do. Putting a little check there. All right, so
oxidation states you need to
make sure you balance the books properly. Some of you in the United States might
recognize this guy, and I apologize if you don't follow the news of the United
States
you probably don't know who this is. But you don't want to
do what this guy did. He did not keep the books balanced. So don't be like Bernie
Madoff. You have to make sure that when you
are assigning oxidation states, the sum of the oxidation states of all of the atoms
in the species that
you are assigning oxidation states to. Add up to the overall
charge on that species. So, for ions, the sum of
the oxidation state should equal the overall charge on the ion, and you'll
see what I mean when I do some examples. And for neutral molecules, which is
like calcium sulfide, which we just did. The sum of all the oxidation
states of the various atoms in the molecule should equal zero. That's always a good
final check to do, to make sure that you're assigning
oxidation states properly. This is not a particularly difficult thing
to do, because there's a list of rules. You just follow the list of rules and
you should get the right answer. You might want to actually print these
rules out, and there's a copy of these rules in the section of useful
information on the main course page. But here I'll go through
the rules one at a time and we can talk about why the rules
are the way they are. The first rule is that
if you have pure element all of the atoms have
an oxidation state of zero. So this could be for
example all kinds of different things, it could be metallic sodium, if you
just had sodium with a solid next to it. The oxidation state of
the sodium there is zero. There's all sorts of diatomic elements. For example,
there is diatomic chlorine. In diatomic chlorine, the oxidation
state of the chlorine is zero. This is the only case where
the bond is not treated as ionic. Here we're assigning one electron
from the bond to each atom. The next rule is that if you have
a compound that contains fluorine and a different type of element. Then fluorine
has an oxidation
state of minus 1. That's because fluorine is
the most electronegative element. So no matter what else
fluorine bonds with, it's going to take an electron away
from that other element to make the fluoride anion which is
fluorine with a minus one charge. The next rule deals with metals
giving their electrons away. So the alkali metals tend to be plus 1. The alkaline
earth metals
tend to be plus two. And aluminum tends to give up all three
of its electrons to be plus three. So look on your periodic table and you'll see
that the group that has
lithium, sodium, and potassium in it. Rubidium, right? Those tend to give their
electrons away quite easily. Beryllium, magnesium, calcium likes to
be plus two and aluminum likes to give all three electrons away because those
species have very low electronegativity so if they bond with any of the nonmetals
they give their electrons away. So the first three rules are pretty firm,
right? Elemental form equals zero, fluorine turns into fluoride if
it's in any kind of compound, and then these metals that are on the far left
side of periodic table tend to give their electrons to anything else on the
periodic
table, so that all makes sense. Now we get to the rules where things
can have different oxidation states depending on their situation. For example,
hydrogen which you remember
I moved from being on the left side of the periodic table to more in the middle.
Hydrogen is usually plus one. It does frequently give up its electron. What we
would call that? Lemme draw a picture of that, here's a simple Bohr model of
the hydrogen right, we've been doing. If it loses it's electron say minus
electron, what do I have left? What is that?
What would you call that? I'd call that a proton wouldn't you? Okay, so hydrogen is
usually
H plus which is a proton, but if the hydrogen,
it encounters a metal like, let's say, a neutral sodium, the hydrogen
can take the electron away from the sodium because hydrogen has
an open orbital at lower energy. And in that case, it becomes hydride. So, H1 minus
is hydride and
that's hydrogen with two electrons. I'm drawing two dots for
the two electrons. So, hydrogen is plus one sometimes and
it's minus one sometimes. Oxygen is usually minus two. But it can be minus one. For
example,
it's minus one in hydrogen peroxide. You have to follow these rules
in this order, all right? So you always want to go from top to
bottom when you're doing these rules. The final rule is that halogens
are usually minus one. Halogens tend to be
fairly electronegative. And so
they take electronics away from moth-uh, most other species on the periodic table.