Order the electrons in the following orbitals according to their shielding ability: 4s, 4d, 4f.

Video transcript

welcome back everyone. We need to arrange the following electron shells from largest to smallest shielding. We have three P, three S and three D sub shells. So were given options a through D. And to get to our answer, we want to recall the concept of effective nuclear charge, which we should recall. So for effective nuclear charge, it's represented by the symbol I wrote out ZF and recall that this is describing the pulled to the nucleus felt by surrounding electrons. And we want to recall that our valence electrons, which are known as our outermost electrons of an atom, are shielded by our core electrons. So we can imagine that the interaction of these electrons that are shielding the valence electrons from the nucleus can be weakened based on their location of the sublevel that they're involved in. So we can say that in general the effect of electron shells. Two other electrons in the same energy in the same energy level is going to be Where are s orbital experiences? The greatest shielding effect? Sorry. This should say greatest shielding effect here. And let's use a different color where its shielding effect is going to be greater than what's experienced by a p orbital. Where a p orbital is going to have a even greater shielding effect compared to our d orbital's, where our d orbital's will have a greater shielding effect than felt by our f orbital's where R F orbital's we would recognize have the lowest or experience the lowest shielding effect by electrons at the same energy level. Being let's say the three or rather in terms of our f orbital, it would be the fourth energy level, so the 4th, 4th social as our lowest energy level electrons. So considering these facts based on what were given in the prompt were given three P, three P, three S and three D. We would arrange this so that from largest to smallest shielding, we actually have three S, which experiences greater shielding than our three P orbital, which experiences greater shielding than our three D orbital. And this is going to correspond to choice A as the correct choice to complete this example. So I hope that everything I went through is clear. If you have any questions, leave them down below and I'll see everyone in the next practice video.