Copper Chloride - Periodic Table of Videos

Copper chloride is the chemical compound with the chemical formula CuCl₂. This is a light brown solid, which slowly absorbs moisture to form a blue-green dihydrate. The copper(II) chlorides are some of the most common copper(II) compounds, after copper sulfate.
Anhydrous CuCl₂ adopts a distorted cadmium iodide structure. In this motif, the copper centers are octahedral. Most copper(II) compounds exhibit distortions from idealized octahedral geometry due to the Jahn-Teller effect, which in this case describes the localization of one d-electron into a molecular orbital that is strongly antibonding with respect to a pair of chloride ligands. In CuCl₂·2H₂O, the copper again adopts a highly distorted octahedral geometry, the Cu(II) centers being surrounded by two water ligands and four chloride ligands, which bridge asymmetrically to other Cu centers.^[2]
Copper(II) chloride is paramagnetic. Of historical interest, CuCl₂·2H₂O was used in the first electron paramagnetic resonance measurements by Yevgeny Zavoisky in 1944.^[3][4]