While reading about Hydrogen bonding in a book (O.P. Tandon's G.R.B. Organic Chemistry), I came across a sentence that was mentioned in a rather unstructured way relative to how comprehensive I was finding it until then.
Here is the excerpt of that.
And here I quote two of the sentences from the excerpt again which will bring me to my question.
(i) Hydrogen bond is merely an electrostatic force rather than a chemical bond.
(v) All the three atoms in X-H- - -X lie in a straight line.
Question:
If Hydrogen bonds are electrostatic, why are they directional?
So I did some searches and found a pretty good publication by a professor of Indian Institute of Science about the exact same thing.
Here you can find a PDF of the same.
Initially I wondered why any electrostatic bond would be directional against the common understanding of Physics that I have. Here there is a really good rationale about it. But majority of the explanation given in it is really alien to me. Atomic basins and the computational methods are something that I've never even heard about in my senior year.
So the problem here is actually I think I don't understand the terminologies. I'm afraid my question might get closed but I really need someone to explain about it in a rather simple way. And also, could I get a suggestion about where I can read more about things like atomic basin, etc.?
