The shapes are an image of the probability distributions of the electrons basically in quantum physics the electrons can be anywhere or even two positions at once (superposition) however they are more likely to be in the orbitals drawn it's a probability thing essentially more likely to be there than not.GUYS I NEED HELP WITH SCHRODINGER MODEL @Bendwhat?_over @tigermum111
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what i understand so far is that the letter + superscript shows the number of electrons the subshell/orbital thing can hold. the number in front means the group of which the element is in. The order is taken from the periodic table s,s,p,s,p,s,d...
my questions
why are there shapes/what do they mean? What do the lines mean (like why are they diagonal?)?
and the diagonal lines refer to the aufbau principle which goes along the idea that electrons fill the lowest energy level first and the aufbau principle allows you to determine the order of energy so lowest energy subshell would be 1s then 2s then 2p then 3s then 3p and so on. so we would first fill out 1s which can hold 2 electrons that's why helium has electron config: 1s^2 because it has only two electrons and since we fill the lowest energy level i.e. 1s we'd fill that up first. Going further to say Beryllium which has 4 electrons we'd first fill up 1s with two and then we would move to the next energy level which would be 2s so we'd fill up 2 electrons there that's why beryllium electron config is 1s^2 2s^2 now for the third one we have the 2p subshell. So now if we consider say oxygen with 8 electrons we'd fill up the first lowest energy levels 1s^2 and 2s^2 and we'd have 4 electrons remaining, where do we allocate? well the aufbau principle tells us that directly after 2s is 2p which can house a maximum of 6 electrons so we'd place our remaining 4 electrons in there and overall the electron config of oxygen would be 1s^2 2s^2 2p^4 note that the exponents refer to the number of electrons in each subshell
idk why they're diagonal lol quantum phys is just weird