Orbitals

Electrons fill the orbitals of an atom.

One author gave a very good analogy. He compared an atom to a bus where there were people sitting in seats, standing in the aisle and sitting on the roof. He mentioned that the seats fill up first and then the aisle fills up and then additional people go to the roof. This leads to the progression below:

seats –> aisle –> roof

For orbitals, this is called

Aufbau Build-up.

The shapes of orbitals are described by the Schrodinger wave equation.

You should be able to find pictures of s orbitals and p orbitals in a General Chemistry textbook, or somewhere on the internet.

Different orbitals may hybridize to form a set of equal energy orbitals. The most common hybridization is a single 2s orbital hybridizing with three 2p orbitals to form four orbitals.

And there is one more twist to the story: atomic orbitals may combine to form molecular orbitals. We’re stopping here for now, but we aware there is a lot of challenging content out there regarding molecular orbitals.