Born and meyer developed a quantitative theory of bonding in ionic crys- tals in which the potential energy of the system is given by 2 where n is the number of positive-negative ion pairs, and a and n are experimentally determined constants. the first term represents the at- tractive coulomb potential, where α (the madelung constant), depends only on the solid's crvstal structure. (a) show nacl's equilibrium interatomic distance ro is given by (5) 0 tl 2 (b) show nacl's equilibrium binding energy is given by