Pauling's principle of electroneutrality
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Not to be confused with Pauling's electrostatic valence rule, the second of Pauling's rules for ionic crystals.
Not to be confused with Pauli exclusion principle.
Pauling's principle of electroneutrality states that each atom in a stable substance has a charge close to zero. It was formulated by Linus Pauling in 1948 and later revised.[1] The principle has been used to predict which of a set of molecular resonance structures would be the most significant, to explain the stability of inorganic complexes and to explain the existence of π-bonding in compounds and polyatomic anions containing silicon, phosphorus or sulfur bonded to oxygen; it is still invoked in the context of coordination complexes.[2][3] However, modern computational techniques indicate many stable compounds have a greater charge distribution than the principle predicts (they contain bonds with greater ionic character).[4]