3.6: Significance of Recognizing Symmetry Elements
- Page ID
- 32162
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In the forgoing sections of this chapter, the necessary tools to assign a point group to a molecule and to be able to read a character table were introduced. A good question at this point is: What is the importance of these tools in inorganic chemistry?
In fact, there are many applications in the study of inorganic chemistry where these symmetry tools become handy. In general, these applications belong to one of the following categories:
- Understanding the spectroscopic properties of moelcules (introduced in section 3.7);
- Determining the chirality of molecular species (introduced in section 3.8);
- Constructing molecular and hybrid orbitals (Chapter 5).