My Notes
Categories
Having been inspired by a number of wonderful LOs, I introduced group theory in my 'sophomore' inorganic class this spring. In addition to learning to determine the point group of a molecule, students were taught how to construct a qualitative MO diagram though the use of LGOs. While a little more than 5 slides, this is what I used in lecture to cover the material.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Power point slides | 794.49 KB |
| Videos used in slides | 1.81 MB |
Students should be able to assign a point group to a molecule and use a character table, generator functions and LGOs to construct a MO diagram for simple molecules.
The brief videos were captured from Molwave 3DMolSym which no longer seems to exist. I would likely just capture them from https://symotter.org/ now. I did not cover all of the symmetry operations (most notably skipping inversion centers and identity) as they are not necessary for point group determination. I debated including improper rotations but left them. In the future I may not include them since it is highly unlikely that I will give students a molecule that is Sn in symmetry. I also opted to give students very abbreviated character tables. I do teach a senior level course that has a more rigorous group theory component, but I felt simplifying the character tables in this course would be appropriate.
Evaluation
A related lab and exam questions have been posted.