Chemistry - How do noble gases bond with themselves?

Solution 1:

Noble gases usually do not form strong bonds between their atoms - it takes fair amount of energy to dimerise them into excimers, but those are short-lived excited molecules. Thanks to excitation, shells of the atoms aren't closed and they react, but very quickly they lose energy and become separate atoms. On the other hand there are many stable molecules created by heavier noble gases (mainly xenon) with other elements.

As mentioned in comment, you may heard about detection of so called van der Waals molecules of helium, which aren't "true" molecules, but very weakly bound pairs of atoms. In fact helium vdW dimer may have weakest bond even among them, and it was an achievement to observe it.

Solution 2:

The reason why noble gases form molecules is because of London forces, which are very weak. The electrons in noble gas atoms are on the move all the time, so there will be a moment when they will spend more time in an area, which generates a temporary dipole and allows for interaction with another atom.

An addendum regarding noble gas compounds in general: the first noble gas compound synthesised was $\ce{XePtF6}$. When $\ce{[O2+][PtF6-]}$ was discovered by the oxidation of dioxygen with platinum hexafluoride, it was hypothesised that $\ce{XePtF6}$ could be made via the oxidation of xenon with platinum hexafluoride, because of the similar ionisation energies of dioxygen and xenon.

Tags:

Molecules