Hydrogen will donate or share its electron to achieve this configuration, while lithium and sodium will donate their electron to become stable. As a result of losing a negatively charged electron, they become positively charged ions. Group 17 elements, including fluorine and chlorine, have seven ...
A sodium ion is made when a sodium atom loses an electron and becomes positively charged. A chloride ion forms in the opposite way when a chlorine atom gains an electron to become negatively charged. Just like two opposite magnet poles, positive and negative charges attract one another. So ...
But something starts to change when the Universe reaches around 300,000 years of age. The background photons that are part of the leftover Big Bang have finally become too cool to immediately kick electrons off of their nuclei. There are still a few of those very high energies, but there ...
When an atom donates an electron to the other, both atoms become ions, each with an opposite charge, and they are bonded by electrostatic attraction. This is called an ionic bond. When atoms share electrons to complete each other's outer shells, they form a covalent bond, which isn't as...
Chemistry students and teachers often explain the chemical reactivity of atoms, molecules, and chemical substances in terms of purposes or needs (e.g., atoms want or need to gain, lose, or share electrons in order to become more stable). These teleological explanations seem to have pedagogical...
Sometimes these isotopes are stable, but often they are not and eventually decay. Discovery of the atom It has been known that elements are broken down into basic units of a given weight since the early 1800s, in an insight that came from the English scientist John Dalton. He considered ...
Explain why the energy level of an atom become energy bands in a solid. Why do stars explode when they die? Can atoms disappear? Why is there far more matter than antimatter in the observable universe? Why does nuclear fuel explode? Why is a larger nucleus generally less stable than a sm...
Covalent bonds form when atoms share electrons, like the oxygen element existing in stable form as two covalently bonded oxygen atoms. Ionic bonds, on the other hand, form when one atom loses an electron to become positively charged, and a second atom gains the electron to become negatively ch...
For Eq. (6) to be valid, the dimer must be the stable nucleus (critical nucleus i = 1 atom). Generally speaking, this assumption appears to be correct for strongly bonded materials (metals, semiconductors) (Lewis and Campbell, 1967) at not too high temperatures. For Si/Si(001), single...
In the latter cases the dissipation of the kinetic energy and neutralization of the charge within a small volume produces a high concentration of radicals, ions, and excited molecules in the region where the recoiling atom is slowed to energies where it can form stable bonds. Usually the ...