Stern & Gerlach Experiment

[Abigail Carter 4G]

What is the Stern and Gerlach experiment and what is its relation and importance to quantum numbers?

[Eesha Chattopadhyay 2K]

The experiment consisted of passing a beam of silver atoms through a magnetic field. When this was done, it split into two beams because the electrons that had an upward spin and those that had a downward spin created their own magnetic fields. The stern and Gerlach experiment determined the presence of electron spin, and thus necessitated the Ms quantum number

[Clarice Chui 2C]

^ Just to add, m sub s can either be +1/2 or -1/2. If it is positive, the electron is spin up and if it is negative, the electron is spin down.

[Sean Sugai 4E]

In this experiment, Stern and Gerlach initially pushed a narrow stream of silver atoms through a magnet to determine if the magnetic field would push atoms by different degrees based on the orientation of the electron's spin. This is what they observed at first, but it proved to be misleading since atoms collide with each other as they're being pushed through the beam, resulting in atoms being moved in different directions and giving the illusions that they're moving based on the electron's orientation. As a result, Stern and Gerlach used a less dense beam of silver atoms to reduce the number of collisions in the beam, which resulted in only two narrow and opposite bands. This indicated that electron's have a spin and the opposite bands demonstrated that electrons can only have two orientations: up and down. The spin states are represented by a fourth quantum number, the spin magnetic quantum number, or Ms, which can only have two values: +0.5 (up spin) and -0.5 (down spin).