Electronegativity
Reparametrization — r = 0.979 — Circular via Bonding CharacterElectronegativity — how strongly an atom attracts electrons in a bond — correlates with the coherence parameter at r = 0.979. This is the second-strongest correlation in the chemistry data.
Why This Works
Electronegativity measures the strength of electron-atom coupling. High electronegativity (fluorine: 3.98) means electrons are tightly bound, highly correlated with the nucleus. Low electronegativity (cesium: 0.79) means electrons are loosely held, weakly correlated.
This is a direct expression of Ncorr: how many particles (electrons + nucleus) are moving as a correlated unit determines both the electronegativity and the γ value.
Circularity via bonding character (explorer finding, 2026-05-06)
The site's documented Ncorr methods include an entropy-ratio method whose inputs (Suncorrelated, Seffective) depend on bonding character — covalent vs. ionic vs. metallic — through vibrational density of states and cohesive energy. Electronegativity is the operational measure of bonding ionicity (bond ionicity ∝ (χA − χB)²), so under that method electronegativity enters γ through the same bonding-character variable it is then correlated against. No method that avoids this overlap has been shown applied to this dataset. See Chemistry Correlation Explorer for the same caveat applied to the wider cohort.
Connection to Sound Velocity
Both sound velocity (r = 0.982) and electronegativity (r = 0.979) correlate with γ for the same reason: they both measure aspects of collective coupling. Sound velocity measures atom-atom coupling; electronegativity measures electron-atom coupling. The coherence function captures the underlying correlation structure that drives both. Both correlations carry the circularity caveat above — see Sound Velocity for that page's additional sign-inversion problem, which is specific to density-defined quantities and has not been separately checked for electronegativity.