Understanding Atomic Orbitals: Shapes of s, p, and d Orbitals, Slides of Acting

Download Understanding Atomic Orbitals: Shapes of s, p, and d Orbitals and more Slides Acting in PDF only on Docsity! THE SHAPES OF THE ORBITALS The lowest energy orbital, with L=0, is called an s-orbital. Its shape is always a sphere, as shown on the right. In the spherical harmonic functions that describe the spaces that electrons occupy, when the quantum number L is zero, the quantum number mL must also be zero, and the only possible 3-D shape that can arise is the sphere. There are no sub- orbitals of an s-orbital We interpret this sphere as the region within which it's most likely to find an electron if we could find it. Remember that an electron bound to an atom is acting much more like a wave than a tiny particle. Every shell (labeled by n) has one s-orbital, each larger than the one below it. Each s-orbital can hold, at most, two electrons, and those must have paired spins, one a +1/2, the other a -1/2. It's another quirk of quantum behavior that we just have to get used to: No two electrons bound to an atom can have exactly the same set of quantum numbers, n, L, mL and mS. P-orbitals are where things start getting interesting. How on Earth does this strange dumbbell shape arise? We have to remember where we began. Electrons must be understood on their own terms. These orbital shapes arise from the solutions to the Schrödinger equation which exactly reproduce all that is known about the H-atom. They are what they are. P-orbitals actually resemble some of the kinds of patterns you might observe if you could see electromagnetic waves coming off of an antenna. The p-orbitals look like this because electrons act more like waves than particles when they're bound to atoms.