How do you write the orbital diagram for phosphate?

1 Answer
Aug 11, 2017

I interpreted this as the molecular orbital diagram... and it became rather complicated (I honestly don't think you want to know the minor details!).

Here's the scratchwork when I was getting the reducible representations Gamma_(S(O)), Gamma_(p_y(O)), Gamma_(p_x(O)), and Gamma_(p_z(O)), and the decomposed irreducible representations (A_1 + T_2, E + T_1 + T_2), for the four oxygen atoms transforming as a group:

The whole point of that was to see how the oxygen orbital energies split up (and which were two-fold or three-fold degenerate). It was also to figure out which orbitals on phosphorus interact with which orbitals on the oxygen atoms.

The resultant MO diagram was:

Takeaways:

  • This is only qualitative, so take it with a grain of salt.
  • Phosphate has all electrons paired.
  • The nonbonding orbitals are nonbonding either due to mismatched symmetries, overly different inner-atom/outer-atom orbital energies, or interactions between both high-lying and low-lying orbitals.
  • There are 22 nonbonding electrons, which accounts for all 11 lone pairs of electrons that belong to the oxygen atoms. The remaining 2 nonbonding electrons account for the bb(pi) bond that is delocalized.
  • The sigma bond order that this MO diagram seems to account for is 1 for all four bb(sigma) bonds, as there are four clearly-bonding MOs (a_1 + t_2), one for each bond.