This article states the concept of covalent bond order for open-shell systems from the invariance properties of the first- and second-order reduced density matrices for all the components of a multiplet state. A general bond order definition is formulated in the framework of the electronic population analyses in the Hilbert space of atomic orbitals.
The article was received on 14 Apr 2008, accepted on 28 May 2008 and first published on 26 Jun 2008
If you are not the author of this article and you wish to reproduce material from it in a third party non-RSC publication you must formally request permission using RightsLink. Go to our Instructions for using RightsLink page for details.
Authors contributing to RSC publications (journal articles, books or book chapters) do not need to formally request permission to reproduce material contained in this article provided that the correct acknowledgement is given with the reproduced material.
Reproduced material should be attributed as follows:
If the material has been adapted instead of reproduced from the original RSC publication "Reproduced from" can be substituted with "Adapted from".
In all cases the Ref. XX is the XXth reference in the list of references.
If you are the author of this article you do not need to formally request permission to reproduce figures, diagrams etc. contained in this article in third party publications or in a thesis or dissertation provided that the correct acknowledgement is given with the reproduced material.
Reproduced material should be attributed as follows:
If you are the author of this article you still need to obtain permission to reproduce the whole article in a third party publication with the exception of reproduction of the whole article in a thesis or dissertation.
Information about reproducing material from RSC articles with different licences is available on our Permission Requests page.
Fetching data from CrossRef.