Chapter 5: Chemical Bonding Investigations for Materials¹

The technologically relevant properties of materials and their electronic structure are intimately connected, but such a connection is by no means intuitive. Chemists rationalize the electronic structure of compounds through the analysis of their chemical bonding network, that is through the construction of a set of paradigms that aim at predict and explain the properties of materials. This chapter gives a broad overview of the most widely adopted chemical bonding investigation tools. For each of them, we review the theory behind its underpinning paradigms and illustrate some representative applications. The last section of the chapter is devoted to discussing the synergic use of chemical bonding tools in compounds with non-conventional bonding patterns as well as in technologically-relevant materials.