Improvement of the Lewis-Abegg-Octet Rule Using an “Even-Odd” Rule in Chemical Structural Formulas: Application to Hypo and Hyper-Valences of Stable Uncharged Gaseous Single-Bonded Molecules with Main Group Elements

As Lewis proposed his octet rule, itself inspired by Abegg’s rule, that a molecule is stable when all its composing atoms have eight electrons in their valence shell, it perfectly applied to the vast majority of known stable molecules. Only a few stable molecules were known that didn’t fall under this rule, such as PCl5 and SF6, and Lewis chose to leave them aside at the time of his research. With further advances in chemistry, more exceptions to this rule of eight have been found, usually with the central atom of the structure having more or less than eight electrons in its valence shell. Theories have been developed in order to modify the octet rule to suit these molecules, defining these as hyper- or hypo-valent molecules and using other configurations for the electrons. The present paper aims to propose a representation rule for gaseous single-bonded molecules that makes it possible to reconcile both; molecules following the octet theory and those which do not. In this representation rule, each element of the molecule is subscripted with two numbers that follow a set of simple criteria. The first represents the number of valence electrons of the element; while the second is calculated by adding the first number to the number of the element’s covalent bonds within the molecule. The latter is equal to eight for organic molecules following the octet rule. Molecules being exceptions to the octet rule are now encompassed by this new even-odd rule: they have a valid chemical structural formula in which the second number is even but not always equal to eight. Both rules—octet and even-odd—are discussed and compared, using several well-known gaseous molecules having one or several single-bonded elements. A future paper will discuss the application of the even-odd rule to charged molecules.