The electron configuration is a representation of how the electrons are distributed among the orbital shells and subshells in an atom. Ther...
The electron configuration is a representation of how the electrons are distributed among the orbital shells and subshells in an atom.
There are different ways of representing the electron configuration. I will discuss the more common ones.
The first one that I would like to discuss is often referred to as the energy orbital diagram, shown below. In this representation the increasing energy of the orbitals is explicitly given or indicated by an arrow and the orbitals are organized accordingly.
The other representations for the electron configuration organize the orbitals horizontally. Here the energy increases as you go from left to right. All of the following electron configurations are equivalent representations for the nitrogen atom.
In addition, we have a condensed electron configuration. In this representation, we use a noble gas to replace part of the configuration. For example, nitrogen has 7 electrons. We need to find a noble gas that has the closest but less number of electrons than nitrogen. In this case it is helium, and it has 2 electrons. Then, we write the symbol of helium in square brackets. The latter indicates the electron configuration of helium (1s2), then you need to write the remaining part of the electron configuration.
