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The chemical elements can be broadly divided into metals, metalloids, and nonmetals according to their shared physical and chemical properties.All elemental metals have a shiny appearance (at least when freshly polished); are good conductors of heat and electricity; form alloys with other metallic elements; and have at least one basic oxide.
In many metals, the charge carriers are electrons. One or two of the valence electrons from each atom are able to move about freely within the crystal structure of the metal. [4] The free electrons are referred to as conduction electrons, and the cloud of free electrons is called a Fermi gas. [5] [6] Many metals have electron and hole bands. In ...
Nonmetals show more variability in their properties than do metals. [1] Metalloids are included here since they behave predominately as chemically weak nonmetals.. Physically, they nearly all exist as diatomic or monatomic gases, or polyatomic solids having more substantial (open-packed) forms and relatively small atomic radii, unlike metals, which are nearly all solid and close-packed, and ...
The elements commonly classified as metalloids are boron, silicon, germanium, arsenic, antimony and tellurium. [n 4] The status of polonium and astatine is not settled. Most authors recognise one or the other, or both, as metalloids; Herman, Hoffmann and Ashcroft, on the basis of relativistic modelling, predict astatine will be a monatomic metal.
In 1802 the term "metalloids" was introduced for elements with the physical properties of metals but the chemical properties of non-metals. [194] However, in 1811, the Swedish chemist Berzelius used the term "metalloids" [195] to describe all nonmetallic elements, noting their ability to form negatively charged ions with oxygen in aqueous ...
Where is the Avogadro constant, Z is the number of valence electrons, is the density of the material, and is the atomic mass. Since metals can display multiple oxidation numbers, the exact definition of how many "valence electrons" an element should have in elemental form is somewhat arbitrary, but the following table lists the free electron ...
Recognition status, as metalloids, of some elements in the p-block of the periodic table. Percentages are median appearance frequencies in the lists of metalloids. [n 1] The staircase-shaped line is a typical example of the arbitrary metal–nonmetal dividing line found on some periodic tables.
The dividing line between metals and nonmetals can be found, in varying configurations, on some representations of the periodic table of the elements (see mini-example, right). Elements to the lower left of the line generally display increasing metallic behaviour; elements to the upper right display increasing nonmetallic behaviour.