van der Waals radius
Sign in to savein chemistry, a measure for the size of an atom that is not chemically (ionically or covalently) bound; half the closest distance of two equal, non-covalently bound, atoms
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Encyclopedic overview
The van der Waals radius, rw, of an atom is the radius of an imaginary hard sphere representing the distance of closest approach for another atom. It is named after Johannes Diderik van der Waals, winner of the 1910 Nobel Prize in Physics, as he was the first to recognise that atoms were not simply points and to demonstrate the physical consequences of their size through the van der Waals equation of state.
van der Waals volume
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “van der Waals radius” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.