What are some common mistakes students make with orbitals?

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Answer 1 · 2018-07-09T09:28:53

Well, I suppose it would be the following...

Two common mistakes would be:

So, consider the following examples.

Recall that the principal quantum number $n = 1, 2, 3, . . .$ and the angular momentum quantum number $l = 0, 1, 2, . . . , ul(n-1)$ .

Therefore, it follows that if $n$ is some integer, then $l$ can be no greater than $n$ , i.e. $1p$ , $2d$ , and $3f$ orbitals do not exist, etc. because for these, it is NOT the case that $l < n$ , while it must be.
Or, we distinguish between the fact that if you have a set of $d$ orbitals, it does not mean that $10$ electrons can go into one orbital...

But it DOES mean that you can have $10$ electrons total in that subshell, as there can be $2$ electrons per $d$ orbital, of which there are $5$ .