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The freedom of electrons to migrate also gives metal atoms, or layers of them, the capacity to slide past each other. Locally, bonds can easily be broken and replaced by new ones after a deformation. This process does not affect the communal metallic bonding very much, which gives rise to metals' characteristic malleability and ductility. This ...
In aqueous solutions, redox potential is a measure of the tendency of the solution to either gain or lose electrons in a reaction. A solution with a higher (more positive) reduction potential than some other molecule will have a tendency to gain electrons from this molecule (i.e. to be reduced by oxidizing this other molecule) and a solution with a lower (more negative) reduction potential ...
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.
Strong reducing agents easily lose (or donate) electrons. An atom with a relatively large atomic radius tends to be a better reductant. In such species, the distance from the nucleus to the valence electrons is so long that these electrons are not strongly attracted. These elements tend to be strong reducing agents.
Transitioning to a new period: an alkali metal easily loses one electron to leave an octet or pseudo-noble gas configuration, so those elements have only small values for IE. Moving from the s-block to the p-block: a p-orbital loses an electron more easily. An example is beryllium to boron, with electron configuration 1s 2 2s 2 2p 1. The 2s ...
As such, they have the tendency to gain more electrons in order to achieve a stable configuration. This tendency is known as electronegativity. When a highly electropositive metal is combined with a highly electronegative nonmetal, the extra electrons from the metal atoms are transferred to the electron-deficient nonmetal atoms.
The presence of such bands allows electrons in metals to behave as if they were free or delocalized electrons. These electrons are not associated with specific atoms, so when an electric field is applied, they are free to move like a gas (called Fermi gas) [137] through the material much like free electrons.
Later, scientists realized that the metal atom gains electrons in this process. The meaning of reduction then became generalized to include all processes involving a gain of electrons. [10] Reducing equivalent refers to chemical species which transfer the equivalent of one electron in redox reactions. The term is common in biochemistry. [11]