This article needs additional citations for. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2009) () Arrow pushing or electron pushing is a technique used to describe the progression of mechanisms. It was first developed. In using arrow pushing, 'curved arrows' or 'curly arrows' are superimposed over the of reactants in a to show the. The arrows illustrate the movement of as between are broken and formed. Arrow pushing is also used to describe how positive and negative are distributed around through.
It is important to remember, however, that arrow pushing is a formalism and electrons (or rather, electron density) do not move around so neatly and discretely in reality. Recently, arrow pushing has been extended to, especially to the chemistry of s- and p- elements. It has been shown to work well for compounds. Trajectory of single electron When a bond is broken, electrons leave where the bond was and this is represented by a curved arrow pointing away from the bond and ending the arrow pointing towards the next unoccupied molecular orbital. Similarly, organic chemists represent the formation of a bond by a curved arrow pointing between two species.