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An unpaired electron has a magnetic dipole moment, while an electron pair has no dipole moment because the two electrons have opposite spins so their magnetic dipole fields are in opposite directions and cancel. Thus an atom with unpaired electrons acts as a magnetic dipole and interacts with a magnetic field. Only elements with unpaired ...
The highest occupied orbital energy level of dioxygen is a pair of antibonding π* orbitals. In the ground state of dioxygen, this energy level is occupied by two electrons of the same spin, as shown in the molecular orbital diagram. The molecule, therefore, has two unpaired electrons and is in a triplet state.
A high multiplicity state is therefore the same as a high-spin state. The lowest-energy state with maximum multiplicity usually has unpaired electrons all with parallel spin. Since the spin of each electron is 1/2, the total spin is one-half the number of unpaired electrons, and the multiplicity is the number of unpaired electrons + 1.
As an example, consider the ground state of silicon.The electron configuration of Si is 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6 3s 2 3p 2 (see spectroscopic notation).We need to consider only the outer 3p 2 electrons, for which it can be shown (see term symbols) that the possible terms allowed by the Pauli exclusion principle are 1 D , 3 P , and 1 S.
The maximum number of unpaired electrons is 7, in Gd 3+, with a magnetic moment of 7.94 B.M., but the largest magnetic moments, at 10.4–10.7 B.M., are exhibited by Dy 3+ and Ho 3+. However, in Gd 3+ all the electrons have parallel spin and this property is important for the use of gadolinium complexes as contrast reagent in MRI scans.
Here [Ne] refers to the core electrons which are the same as for the element neon (Ne), the last noble gas before phosphorus in the periodic table. The valence electrons (here 3s 2 3p 3) are written explicitly for all atoms. Electron configurations of elements beyond hassium (element 108) have never been measured; predictions are used below.
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 electrons.
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 ...