(c) What does each box in an orbital diagram represent?

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Welcome back everyone in this example, we need to identify which statement describes each box in an orbital diagram. So we want to recall that orbital diagrams represent our electrons and how they're configured bonding wise for an atom. So we can say that orbital diagrams show how electrons are bonding for an atom or an ion. Now looking at statement a it says that each box represents a sub shell. Now we want to recognize that our sub shells include the S sub shell, P sub shell, D sub shell and then our F sub shell. Recall that R f r sorry, R S sub shell consists of only one orbital represented by this box here. Whereas our p sub shell represents multiple boxes where we have a total of three boxes which represent three orbital's. So this is orbital one, this is orbital too. And then this is orbital three and making more room. We are describing next hour D sub shell which describes a set of a total of five boxes where each box represents each orbital attributed to the d sub shell. So we have five orbital's attributed to the D sub shell. Recall that each orbital for any sub shell can hold a maximum of two electrons. And so we would count a total of 10 electrons max for our D sub shell. We would count a total of six electrons max for our p sub shell and we would count a total of two electrons max for R S sub shell. Lastly we have our F sub shell which is characterized by a total of seven orbital's. So we would have seven boxes to represent these seven orbital's and because there are seven orbital's, we can fill in a maximum of 14 electrons for the f sub shell. So these two are separate. Just so it's clear I'm just going to scoot this down. This one goes back up here and this is our F sub shell. So if we know that the letters are our sub shells, S, P D and F, we would say that statement A is false because we know that each box represents a orbital or orbital's. So we can rule out choice A. It's not describing each box in the orbital diagram. Let's move on to statement. It says that each box represents an electron. We know that our electrons are filled in at a maximum of two each per orbital. And so we also want to recall our poly exclusion principle when filling in our orbital's which states that we should fill in each of our electrons singly first in any direction. I'm using an upward spin here before. Doubly pairing up our electrons. And so that is why, as we stated, the p sub shell can hold a maximum of six electrons in its total of three orbital's. So we know that each box does not represent an electron as we stated above. Each box represents an orbital or a set of orbital's based on whatever sub shell you're in. So we would say that statement B is false. Each box represents an orbital moving on to statement see it says that each box represents an electron pair. Again, our electrons are represented as our opposite lee spinning arrows here that we fill in our orbital's. So we would also say that statement C is false because electrons are represented by arrows and meaning we can rule out choice C. Next we have choice D, which states that each box represents an orbital. We can definitely agree with that. We outlined that the sub shell has one orbital. The P sub shell has a total of three orbital's. We outlined that the D sub shell has five orbital's and the F sub shell has seven orbital's. We agree with statement D as a true and we'll use the color blue here. It's a true statement. So Choice D would be the only correct answer choice to complete this example as the best statement to describe each box in an orbital diagram. If you have any questions, leave them down below and I'll see everyone in the next practice video

(c) What does each box in an orbital diagram represent?

Verified Solution

Key Concepts

Orbital Diagrams

Quantum Mechanics

Pauli Exclusion Principle