covalent bonding and ionic bonding? what’s the difference?
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In a chemical bond, two atoms are attached by the ways in which their surrounding electrons interact.
In a covalent bond, the two atoms share electrons, which spend “most of their time” in between the two atoms. The electrons like to be close to the nuclei of atoms, and being between the two atoms lets them be close to both. Common covalent bonds are things like the carbon-carbon bonds in many organic molecules.
In an ionic bond, on the other hand, an electron is so much more strongly attracted to one atom than to the other that one atom basically “steals” the electron from the other atom. That makes one atom positively charged and the other negatively charged, which causes the two to be attracted to one another’s opposite charges.
In reality, covalent bonds and fully ionic bonds are at two ends of a spectrum of bonds, where covalent bonds are symmetric with electrons between the two atoms and ionic bonds pull the electron completely to one side. In between are polar bonds, where the electrons are between the two but pulled to one side. In practice, most bonds are far to one side or the other of that spectrum, so it’s useful to categorize the two types of bond as basically different kinds of thing.
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