How can you determine electron cloud size?

1 Answer
Truong-Son N.
Jun 28, 2017

Well, I guess you look at the orbital radial density distribution and see when it is zero at #r > 0#. This is not trivial...

If you just mean relative orbital sizes, higher principal quantum number #n# usually indicates the orbital is larger:

Graphed from H atom Wave Function

You can see that orbitals with the #l_(max)# allowed at each #n# increase in size with increasing quantum level #n#, since they taper off to zero at larger #r#.

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