Orbitals essays

Orbitals essays Moving Object has wave like characteristics Particles really do have wave-like properties, it just took a while for us to notice them. It wasn't discovered until 1925 that electrons do have wave characteristics. An American physicist, Clinton Davisson, was working with Lester Germer at Bell Labs reflecting electrons. An apparatus containing a nickel target was damaged, breaking the vacuum and ruining the prepared sample of nickel. Davisson and Germer heated the nickel to use it again, unintentionally fusing it into large crystals. When electrons were scattered off these crystals, diffraction patterns were observed, demonstrating that electrons have wave characteristics. We treat a light wave as a ray of light if the wavelength of the light is smaller than the size of objects that it encounters. If the wavelength is about the same size or larger than objects it encounters, we must acknowledge the wave properties of the light. An electron of course is a particle. We know its mass, charge, and some real-world effects that demonstrate the particular nature of an electron. Diffraction is fundamentally a wave property. Even if we could explain diffraction in terms of particles, the explanation in terms of waves is the simplest one- that's what it means to say that the electrons behave as waves. Quantum Number The quantum number indicates how far the orbital is from the nucleus. Electrons are farther away for higher values of n. By Coulombs law we know that electrons, which are closer to the positively charged nucleus, are more powerfully attracted and thus have lower potential energies. Electrons of orbitals with higher values of n, being farther away from the nucleus, have greater potential energies. In a given atom, all the atomic orbitals with the same n are known as a shell. n can take on integer values of 1 or higher (ex. 1, 2, 3, etc.).The Quantum numb...