Fig. 8-8. Contour maps of the molecular orbital charge densities for O2 at the equilibrium internuclear distance of 2.282 au. Only one component of the Ipg and 1pu orbitals is shown. All the maps are for doubly-occupied orbitals with the exception of that for 1pg for which each component of the doubly-degenerate orbital contains a single electron. The nodes are indicated by dashed lines. Click here for contour values.
The molecular orbitals of p symmetry are doubly degenerate and a filled set of p orbitals will contain four electrons. The node in a pu orbital is in the plane which contains the internuclear axis and is not perpendicular to this axis as is the node in a su orbital. (The nodal properties of the orbitals are indicated in Fig. 8-4.) The pu orbital is therefore bonding. A pg orbital, on the other hand, is antibonding because it has, in addition to the node in the plane of the bond axis, another at the bond mid-point perpendicular to the axis. The bonding and antibonding characters of the p orbitals have just the opposite relationship to their g and u dependence as have the s orbitals.
The 1sg and 1su orbital densities have, as in the case of Li2, degenerated into localized atomic distributions with the characteristics of 1s core densities and are nonbonding. The valence electrons of O2 are contained in the remaining orbitals, a feature reflected in the extent to which their density distributions are delocalized over the entire molecule. Aside from the inner nodes encircling the nuclei, the 2sg and 2suorbital densities resemble the 1sg and 1su valence density distributions of H2 and He2. A quantitative discussion of the relative binding abilities of the 2sg , 3sg and 1p orbital densities is presented in the following section.
One interesting feature of the electronic configuration of O2 is that its outer orbital is not fully occupied. The two pg electrons could both occupy one of the pg orbitals with paired spins or they could be assigned one to each of the pg orbitals and have parallel spins. Hund's principle applies to molecules as well as to atoms and the configuration with single occupation of both pg orbitals with parallel spins is thus predicted to be the most stable. This prediction of molecular orbital theory regarding the electronic structure of O2 has an interesting consequence. The oxygen molecule should be magnetic because of the resultant spin angular momentum possessed by the electrons. The magnetism of O2 can be demonstrated experimentally in many ways, one of the simplest being the observation that liquid oxygen is attracted to the poles of a strong magnet.