Silver Atom

[Rose_Malki_3G]

In today's lecture, Dr. Lavelle talks about the silver atom used in the Stern and Garlach Experiment. He says that the silver atom has one unpaired electron in the 5s state. Can someone please explain to me why that is the case (because I would have thought the unpaired electron was in the 4d state).

[Annie Tong 2G]

For the energy level n, the d-orbitals that belong to the (n−1) energy level are lower in energy than the s and p orbitals that belong to the n energy level.This means that you will have to switch the 3d orbitals with the 4s orbital to get 3d10 4s2 4p6 and 4d10 5s1. The 4d orbital is filled completely because a complete subshell is stable and a half-filled subshell is somewhat stable. To get to that point the best arrangement is to completely fill 4d and fill half of 5s.

[Chudi Onyedika 3A]

Silver's configuration ends at 4d9. However, when an orbital is not completed or halfway completed, it is typically unstable.

In order to stabilize the atom, you would need to take an electron from the 5s orbital (which is ok because it will become 5s1, half of the orbital) and add it to 4d9 to make it 4d10.

[IanWheeler3F]

the entire group 11 follows the same pattern, and then there's another weird group, 6, that fills half of its d orbitals after taking one electron from the outermost s orbital (for chromium its 3d5 4s1) since it is more stable to fill half of the d orbitals, much like how it is more stable to fill all the d orbitals