BY Team Aakash Byju's

Class 11 Chemistry Notes: How to Find Dipole Moment?

As the name suggests, a ‘Dipole moment’ is the moment produced by a magnetic or electric dipole.

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To establish the dipole moment, we need to separate 2 charges with opposite signs but equal magnitude by a distance.

 It is the product of charge on anyone atom of a covalent molecule and the intermolecular distance of these atoms.

Dipole moment => μ = q · r. It acts in the direction from a less electronegative charge to a more electronegative atom or from an atom to lone pair.

 Since dipole momentum has both magnitude and direction, it can be called a  ‘Vector quantity’.

The net dipole moment defines whether or not a compound is a polar or nonpolar molecule.

For a nonpolar molecule, the net or total dipole moment is zero. For, e.g., CO2 is nonpolar.

 HCl is a polar molecule, and the bond dipole moment is shown below.

 The SI unit of dipole moment is ampere second metre or coulomb-metre (C m).  A non-SI unit of dipole moment is ‘Debye’. 

 For a polyatomic molecule, the molecule's dipole moment is the vector sum of all bond dipoles in the molecule.

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