The Chemical Bond

One of the fundamental territories of chemistry is the chemical bond, the glue from which an entire chemical universe is constructed. For a while it seemed that Chemists have, by and large, abandoned their territory as if everything about bonding is known and well understood; the frontier has moved to Nano and Bio, leaving the original territory untended. This however was a wrong impression, since the interest in bonding has quickly revived to be accompanied by many interesting theoretical approaches to probe the origins of bonds, many novel bonding motifs, and even experimental studies that describe imaging of bonds being broken and remade using atomic force microscopy. The bond is becoming again a central intellectual arena. Enormous progress was made in recent time in method development which gives insight into the chemical bond using calculated numbers which come from sophisticated quantum chemical methods in line with the famous statement of Charles Coulson: Give us insight not numbers. This return of the bond has prompted the two editors to edit these two volumes on bonding, and it is only fitting that their publication date is close to the centenary of the Lewis seminal paper on electron pair bonding. The two volumes are meant to attract the interest of the practicing chemist, teachers and advanced students who may want to learn about the present understanding of chemical bonding. Volume 2 which includes eighteen chapters that describe applications to chemical bonding going from main group elements, through transition metals, rare earths, clusters and solids, and all the way to the weak interaction.