Question

What is a single carbon molecule?

Answer 1

If you mean, what molecule has one carbon, it could be anything...

• `"CH"_4`
• `"CH"_3"Cl"`
• `"CH"_2"Cl"_2`
• `"CHCl"_3`
• `"CCl"_4`

or any variant that switches out the halogen for another one... There is no such thing as a molecule containing one carbon atom and nothing else around it.

`"C"_2`, however, has been observed before.

Based on the MO diagram, how do you show that the bond order is `2`? (How many bonding electrons are there?)