McCaw Chemistry

Resources written by Chas McCaw for sixth form chemistry teaching and beyond.

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Diamond 2: space-filling representation of the structure

In the structure to the left the atom sizes are more realistic, taking into account the overlap of one atom's orbitals with another to form a covalent bond. However, even though it is more realistic, you can see that it is a less useful way to depict the structure.

We can describe the lattice structure more completely by considering repeating units. These are described on the next page.

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