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Probability densities for the first few hydrogen atom orbitals, seen in cross-section. The energy level of a bound electron determines the orbital it occupies, and the color reflects the probability of finding the electron at a given position. An electron can be bound to the nucleus of an atom by the attractive Coulomb force. A system of one or ...
In chemistry and atomic physics, an electron shell may be thought of as an orbit that electrons follow around an atom's nucleus. The closest shell to the nucleus is called the "1 shell" (also called the "K shell"), followed by the "2 shell" (or "L shell"), then the "3 shell" (or "M shell"), and so on further and further from the nucleus.
Orbitals of multi-electron atoms are qualitatively similar to those of hydrogen, and in the simplest models, they are taken to have the same form. For more rigorous and precise analysis, numerical approximations must be used. A given (hydrogen-like) atomic orbital is identified by unique values of three quantum numbers: n, ℓ, and m ℓ.
For example, the electron configuration of the neon atom is 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6, meaning that the 1s, 2s, and 2p subshells are occupied by two, two, and six electrons, respectively. Electronic configurations describe each electron as moving independently in an orbital, in an average field created by the nuclei and all the other
Later, he proposed the name electron for this unit. At the time, the particle we now call the electron was not yet discovered and the difference between the particle electron and the unit of charge electron was still blurred. Later, the name electron was assigned to the particle and the unit of charge e lost its name.
This page shows the electron configurations of the neutral gaseous atoms in their ground states. For each atom the subshells are given first in concise form, then with all subshells written out, followed by the number of electrons per shell. For phosphorus (element 15) as an example, the concise form is [Ne] 3s 2 3p 3.
Similar to a core electron, a valence electron has the ability to absorb or release energy in the form of a photon. An energy gain can trigger the electron to move (jump) to an outer shell; this is known as atomic excitation. Or the electron can even break free from its associated atom's shell; this is ionization to form a positive ion. When an ...
The name "electron" was adopted for these particles by the scientific community, mainly due to the advocation by George Francis FitzGerald, Joseph Larmor, and Hendrik Lorentz. [ 37 ] : 273 The term was originally coined by George Johnstone Stoney in 1891 as a tentative name for the basic unit of electrical charge (which had then yet to be ...