An experiment called the Stern–Gerlach experiment helped establish the existence of electron spin. In this experiment, a beam of silver atoms is passed through a magnetic field, which deflects half of the silver atoms in one direction and half in the opposite direction. The separation between the two beams increases as the strength of the magnetic field increases. (a) What is the electron configuration for a silver atom?

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Hey everyone in this example, we need to give the electron configuration for a for a rowan jenny um adam. So what we're going to recognize is that rowan jenny um has a symbol of capital R. Lowercase G. And this has the atomic number equal to a value of 111. So we would need an extended periodic table to see this on our periodic tables. So when we look on our extended periodic tables, we would see that Rowan jenny um or atomic # 111 lies across period seven and it's located in our transition metal D block of our periodic tables. With that in mind, we want to recall that any Adam that is in the 3rd row or below of our periodic table will have a fully filled in f sub level. And based on roan geni ums atomic number being 111 We would have the fully filled in 5f sub level. So we're going to use this shorthand configuration by finding the noble gas that comes before period seven on our periodic tables. And we would see that that corresponds to the noble gas raid on on period six represented by R. And as its symbol. So this is going to begin our configuration where we would recognize that our lowest energy level is where we start at first, which is going to be the fifth energy level of our F block, which is fully filled in with its 14 electrons. As we said, Rohan jenny um is located across period seven in our D block, which means that we would recall that across, or that in period seven R D block occurs at the sixth energy level. And so next in our configuration, we would have six D. Now, we want to fully fill up our D block So that we have so that its most stable, even though we would only count for nine units to land on our Adam Roan Jenny um or the atomic number 111. We don't want to make it 69 due to the fact that it would be less stable if it was 69 as its configuration. So how we made the configuration 60 10 here, was that going back to the fact that Rohan jenny um is in period seven of our periodic tables. That would mean that we went through our seventh energy level of R s sub level, which can hold a maximum of two electrons. But instead of two electrons, we've excited one of those electrons. So now that we have only one left for our configuration because that second electron has moved up or down in energy to the sixth energy level to give us electrons for our D block. So that it's stable. And so for our final answer, we would have that our configuration for roman jenny um is Reagan five F 14 six D seven S one. And this would be our most stable noble gas or shorthand configuration for roman jenny um if you have any questions, please leave them down below. Just to be clear. The fact that we made our D. Sublevel stable with 10 electrons was us applying our bow principle, which states that lower energy levels should be filled in with their orbital's first before filling higher energy level orbital's. So what we have for our configuration should make sense, and I hope I was helpful. So I'll see everyone in the next practice video.

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Key Concepts

Electron Configuration

Stern–Gerlach Experiment

Magnetic Fields and Electron Spin