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At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust, [53] lithium is the 31st most abundant element. [54] According to the Handbook of Lithium and Natural Calcium, "Lithium is a comparatively rare element, although it is found in many rocks and some brines, but always in very low concentrations. There are a fairly large number of both lithium mineral and ...
A lithium atom is an atom of the chemical element lithium. Stable lithium is composed of three electrons bound by the electromagnetic force to a nucleus containing three protons along with either three or four neutrons , depending on the isotope , held together by the strong force .
Naturally occurring lithium (3 Li) is composed of two stable isotopes, lithium-6 (6 Li) and lithium-7 (7 Li), with the latter being far more abundant on Earth. Both of the natural isotopes have an unexpectedly low nuclear binding energy per nucleon (5 332.3312(3) keV for 6 Li and 5 606.4401(6) keV for 7 Li) when compared with the adjacent lighter and heavier elements, helium (7 073.9156(4) keV ...
The only stable nuclides having an odd number of protons and an odd number of neutrons are hydrogen-2, lithium-6, boron-10, nitrogen-14 and (observationally) tantalum-180m. This is because the mass–energy of such atoms is usually higher than that of their neighbors on the same isobaric chain, so most of them are unstable to beta decay .
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
An effect of the instability of an odd number of either type of nucleons is that odd-numbered elements, such as the alkali metals, tend to have fewer stable isotopes than even-numbered elements. Of the 26 monoisotopic elements that have only a single stable isotope, all but one have an odd atomic number and all but one also have an even number ...
Atoms of a chemical element that differ only in neutron number are called isotopes. For example, carbon, with atomic number 6, has an abundant isotope carbon-12 with 6 neutrons and a rare isotope carbon-13 with 7 neutrons. Some elements occur in nature with only one stable isotope, such as fluorine.
The neutron number (symbol N) is the number of neutrons in a nuclide. Atomic number (proton number) plus neutron number equals mass number : Z + N = A . The difference between the neutron number and the atomic number is known as the neutron excess: D = N − Z = A − 2 Z .