Professor Galbraith Explores Charge-Shift Bonding

Chemists are hungry to study the composition of matter and the individual properties that pertain it. The vast objects around us are all composed of building blocks that bond together to form diverse molecules that are essentially everything we see and touch. 

Components of atoms bond to form compounds, which is how objects in our world are formed. There are essentially two ways chemists know how atoms bond – ionic and covalent. However, Professor John Galbraith, PhD in Physical Chemistry, at Marist may have discovered a third way of chemical bonding. 

Galbraith has been researching here at Marist College with help from undergraduates throughout the semester. Galbraith was introduced to the idea in Jerusalem, where he held a postdoctoral position, and he has been carrying this project since.

Galbraith started to work on this idea of charge-shift bonding and continued to prove that this bonding exists, despite the fact that this was not accepted by the chemistry community due to lack of evidence. It has always been ionic and covalent bonding, so how could there be more? 

This concept originated through the valence bond theory, which is based on quantum mechanics to explain the electrons pair for covalent bonds. Galbraith in his interview with The Academic Minute said, “Valence bond theory calculations have shown that certain bonds are unstable when considered as covalent or ionic alone. In these cases, the bond only exists as a resonance hybrid, or mixture, of covalent and ionic contributions.” 

In other words, charge-shift bonding happens in unique molecules.

 Currently, Galbraith is working with a few undergraduates who are trained to identify “Charge-shift bonding cases across the periodic table and validating the concept so that it will be considered alongside covalent and ionic as a distinct form of chemical bonding,” he said.  

This work is extremely computational and mathematical, as depicted, using specific science programs to use mathematical formulas to interpret the charge-shift bonding of these molecules. 

 This concept is becoming more and more known in the science community. This other chemical bonding process will open new doors for the chemistry world and expand to other fields, as well. 

It looks like ionic and covalent bonding need to make room in the textbook for charge-shift bonding.