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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.
Liquids made of compounds with only covalent bonds cannot conduct electricity. Certain organic ionic liquids, by contrast, can conduct an electric current. While pure water is not an electrical conductor, even a small portion of ionic impurities, such as salt, can rapidly transform it into a conductor.
These definitions are equivalent to stating that metals conduct electricity at absolute zero, as suggested by Nevill Francis Mott, [2]: 257 and the equivalent definition at other temperatures is also commonly used as in textbooks such as Chemistry of the Non-Metals by Ralf Steudel [3] and work on metal–insulator transitions. [4] [5]
Selenium conducts electricity around 1,000 times better when light falls on it, a property used in light-sensing applications. [141] Hydrogen behaves in some respects like a metallic element and in others like a nonmetal. [142]
In a 1774 letter to Dutch-born British scientist Jan Ingenhousz, Benjamin Franklin relates an experiment by another British scientist, John Walsh, that purportedly showed this astonishing fact: Although rarified air conducts electricity better than common air, a vacuum does not conduct electricity at all. [63]
The author writes that arsenic and antimony resemble metals in their luster and conductivity of heat and electricity but that in their chemical properties they resemble the non-metals, since they form acidic oxides and insoluble in dilute mineral acids; "such elements are called metalloids" (p. 530).
An electrical insulator is a material in which electric current does not flow freely. The atoms of the insulator have tightly bound electrons which cannot readily move. Other materials—semiconductors and conductors—conduct electric current more easily.
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 ...