Thursday, July 30

Today we learned about electron structure and orbital notation. There weren't any labs today. The orbital notation is when you write lines for all the orbitals in an atom, and then draw arrows on top of the lines, pointing up or pointing down. Usually, the arrows pointing up will stand for positively spinning electrons, and arrows pointing down will stand for negatively spinning electrons. Here is a picture of the orbital notation of oxygen.

As you can see from the picture, Oxygen has 8 electrons. They are separated into 3 subshells, 1s, 2s, and 2p. The upward pointing arrows are positive, and the downwards pointing arrows are negative. The two arrows in the last two boxes cannot be put together because of Hund's Law. By separating them, it makes the atom more stable.

We also learned about spdf notation. Instead of the arrows, you just put the number of electrons in each subshell, like so.

1s²2s²2p⁴

Notice that the superscript on each of the subshells indicates the number of electrons in that subshell.

This could get a bit long, though. Take the spdf notation for barium:

                                    1s22s22p63s23p64s23d104p65s24d105p66s2
Using spdf notation would take forever. Luckily, there is an easier way. By using the noble gas notation, you can shorten it to:

[Xe]6s²

Much easier!

Weird thing:

Longest sea bridge in the world

Qingdao Haiwan Bridge