Articles you may be interested inThis work studies the partitioning of the electron density into two contributions which are interpreted as the paired and the effectively unpaired electron densities. The topological features of each density field as well as of the total density are described localizing the corresponding critical points in simple selected molecules ͑local formalism͒. The results show that unpaired electron-density concentrations occur out of the topological bonding regions whereas the paired electron densities present accumulations inside those regions. A comparison of these results with those arising from population analysis techniques ͑nonlocal or integrated formalisms͒ is reported.

This work carries out the study of the Laplacian field function of the electron density L(r) = -nabla2rho(r) splitted in two contributions rho(r) = rho(p)(r) + rho(u)(r), which correspond to the effectively paired and effectively unpaired electron densities, respectively. The visualization of the concentration and depletion of these fields and their spatial localization show no contribution of the effectively unpaired electrons to the conventional bonding among two centers, but the field -nabla2rho(u)(r) provides an interesting structure. We also study the reliability of the information contained in the partitioning of this electron density field function for describing nonclassical bondings as the three-center two-electron ones.

Our previously reported local formalism of the electron density decomposition into effectively paired and unpaired densities is applied to electron deficient molecular systems possessing complex bonding patterns. It is shown that the unpaired density is not only near the nuclear positions, like in classical bonds, but also spills out over the bonding regions, to compensate the electron deficiency. Topological information obtained from the effectively unpaired density, which may not be directly observed from the total density, allows us to establish a procedure to detect complex interactions. This study is complemented with results arising from nonlocal formalism of topological population analyses. The conclusions from both formalisms are in complete agreement and permit to interpret the well-known structural information from Lipscomb styx numbers going beyond it in cases where the electronic description becomes ambiguous, pointing out the subtle information contained in the unpaired density. Numerical results for three-center two-electron bondings in the boranes B2H6, B4H10, B5H9, and B5H11 are reported.