Question

What is the intermediate formed in homolytic fission?

Answer 1

Homolytic fission:

• “In homolytic cleavage, one of the electrons of the shared pair in a covalent bond goes with each of the bonded atoms.”
• It involves the movement of a single electron. The single electron movement is shown by the ‘half-headed’ arrow.
• This fission results in the formation of free radicals that are neutral species with an unpaired electron.
• Homolytic fission can be shown as:

Thus, the intermediate that is formed in homolytic fission is free radicals.