CHEMISTRY COMMUNITY

2.17 How many orbitals are in subshells with l equal to (a) 0; (b) 2; (c) 1; (d) 3?

I saw a previous response for this question and i'm not fully understanding the concept. i know that when l=0, m must equal 0.... but how do we know that when l=2 it'll have 5 orbitals?? can someone please help me unpack this problem

When l=2, m can be -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 which corresponds to 5 orbitals.

I got this from the chart we wrote in lecture on 4/25.

Hope this helps :)

Figure 2.3 in the textbook can help with this. at L=0, for example, there is one orbital.

Miya Lopez 1L wrote:When l=2, m can be -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 which corresponds to 5 orbitals.

I got this from the chart we wrote in lecture on 4/25.

Hope this helps :)

Hi, how did you get (-2,-1,0,1,2) from just l=2?

You can get (-2,-1,0,1,2) from l=2 because as the textbook says, "There are 2l +1 different values of m for a given value of l." This means that when l=2 there will be a total of 5 possible m values. We also learned that m=l,l-1,...-l. This basically means that m can be +l and -l and every whole number in between those two values.

okay yay I actually understand now! Thank you guys!!!!