Many primary amines, RNH2, where R is a carboncontaining
fragment...

Question

Many primary amines, RNH2, where R is a carboncontaining
fragment such as CH3, CH3CH2, and so on,
undergo reactions where the transition state is tetrahedral.
(a) Draw a hybrid orbital picture to visualize the
bonding at the nitrogen in a primary amine (just use a C
atom for “R”).

Accepted Answer

welcome back everyone in this example, we need to draw the hybrid orbital's of methane to visualize the bonding at the carbon. So we're going to recall that methane formula is CH four. So our central atom is carbon and it's surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Now we need to pay attention to the hybridization of our central atom. So we call that our hybridization of our central atom is in reference to the amount of groups surrounding our central atom and our groups would be any lone pairs or bonding regions. So we would have a total of four hydrogen as we stated, surrounding this central carbon atom. And so we would have a total of four groups or bonding regions. And so we would say that therefore our hybridization is s. p. three. We also want to take note of the fact that we have zero lone pairs on our carbon atom since it's bonded to its bonding preference of four bonds with its full octet. And so because it has zero lone pairs, we're going to have a tetrahedron geometry as our molecular geometry and recall that that shape is in appearance like this. So we're going to have one hydrogen atom up here and then three below where to show our hybrid orbital's of our carbon atom, we have a larger lobe and we'll show this going through our carbon since it's a part of our carbon. So we have a larger lobe and a smaller lobe below. Just to make this clear carbon is here. We have another lobe where we have for this bond a large lobe here to this carbon. And let's make this neader. So our large lobe from the bond between this carbon and hydrogen where the smaller lobe overlaps in this direction. Then we have our bond between the carbon and this central hydrogen atom at the bottom here where we have the larger lobe here and the smaller lobe is going to be behind this larger lobe here. We then have to our third bond of or sorry, our fourth bond of hydrogen. We have a larger lobe in this direction to form that bond where we have a smaller lobe there peeking out and actually let's make that a bit more even So let's move this a bit closer. So again we have this larger lobe and then our smaller part of that lobe over here. So these are the hybrid orbital's specifically the four hybrid orbital's of our central carbon atom here where we would draw the orbital's of hydrogen which are unhygienic. Ized as just the s orbital where we just depict them as smaller circles here surrounding our hydrogen label. And again, the orbital's of hydrogen are unhygienic guys because we are only within the s orbital for hydrogen and its configuration. And so our final answer is going to be this entire depiction here with our hybridized orbital's of methane, which would be our blue orbital's that we showcased in our diagram. So I hope everything I explained was clear. If you have any questions, please leave them down below and I'll see everyone in the next practice video.

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