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In chemistry and atomic physics, an electron shell may be thought of as an orbit that electrons follow around an atom's nucleus.The closest shell to the nucleus is called the "1 shell" (also called the "K shell"), followed by the "2 shell" (or "L shell"), then the "3 shell" (or "M shell"), and so on further and further from the nucleus.
In atomic physics and quantum chemistry, the Aufbau principle (/ ˈ aʊ f b aʊ /, from German: Aufbauprinzip, lit. 'building-up principle'), also called the Aufbau rule, states that in the ground state of an atom or ion, electrons first fill subshells of the lowest available energy, then fill subshells of higher energy.
The approximate order of filling of atomic orbitals, following the arrows from 1s to 7p. (After 7p the order includes subshells outside the range of the diagram, starting with 8s.) The principle works very well (for the ground states of the atoms) for the known 118 elements, although it is sometimes slightly wrong.
See illustration of a cross-section of these nested shells, at right. The s orbitals for all n numbers are the only orbitals with an anti-node (a region of high wave function density) at the center of the nucleus. All other orbitals (p, d, f, etc.) have angular momentum, and thus avoid the nucleus (having a wave node at the nucleus).
Electron shells are made up of one or more electron subshells, or sublevels, which have two or more orbitals with the same angular momentum quantum number l. Electron shells make up the electron configuration of an atom. It can be shown that the number of electrons that can reside in a shell is equal to .
For each atom the subshells are given first in concise form, then with all subshells written out, followed by the number of electrons per shell. For phosphorus (element 15) as an example, the concise form is [Ne] 3s 2 3p 3.
Chemist Linus Pauling first developed the hybridisation theory in 1931 to explain the structure of simple molecules such as methane (CH 4) using atomic orbitals. [2] Pauling pointed out that a carbon atom forms four bonds by using one s and three p orbitals, so that "it might be inferred" that a carbon atom would form three bonds at right angles (using p orbitals) and a fourth weaker bond ...
This notation is used to specify electron configurations and to create the term symbol for the electron states in a multi-electron atom. When writing a term symbol, the above scheme for a single electron's orbital quantum number is applied to the total orbital angular momentum associated to an electron state.