An experiment called the Stern–Gerlach experiment helped
establi...

Question

An experiment called the Stern–Gerlach experiment helped 
establish the existence of electron spin. In this experiment, 
a beam of silver atoms is passed through a magnetic field, 
which deflects half of the silver atoms in one direction and 
half in the opposite direction. The separation between the 
two beams increases as the strength of the magnetic field 
increases. (c) Would this experiment work for a 
beam of fluorine (F) atoms?

Accepted Answer

hey everyone in this example, it says that the electron spin was discovered using a beam of silver atoms passed through a magnetic field in the Stern Gerlach experiment. If a beam of neon atoms were used, will the experiment work? So the key word here is that these electrons or these silver atoms rather pass through a magnetic field. And that means that these electrons for these silver atoms, we're capable of magnetism. And that is due to the fact that if we think of silver's electron configuration and we're going to use the shorthand configuration, so we're going to begin with the atom or noble gas, krypton. And because silver we recognize as a transition metal in the D block, we would begin at the fourth energy level of our D block. So we would have four D. We would count for nine units to land on our adam silver. However, we want to recall our ALF about principle so that we have a more stable sublevel here filled in. So we would actually fill this in as 40 10 instead of 49. And that is due to the fact that we're going to excite an electron from our five S sub level. So that we just have five S. One. Because we would recall that R. S sub level can only hold a maximum of two electrons. And if we excite one of those electrons to the D sub level, that would give us now S one as our exponents here leaving us with just one electron in the S. Sublevel. And this is to honor our alpha principles so that we have the most stable configuration. So as you can see, we have now one unpaid electron in our s sublevel. And this is why silver therefore silver is para magnetic and capable of magnetism, which is why the prompt mentions the electrons of our silver atoms passing through the magnetic field. However, the question is asking for a beam of neon atoms being used and whether the experiment will work. So we want to think of neon and its electron configuration to see whether it will have any unpaid electrons. So when we recall our configuration for neon, we would see that we have the configuration helium as our noble gas here and we're going to go through the two S to sub level. And then we would recognize that neon is located in R. P. Block because we're at the second period, we go directly into the P block. So we would be at the second energy level of the P block and it's located all the way at the end, meaning we would fully fill up our P block which has a total of three orbital's and can hold a maximum of six electrons. So we would have six in our exponents to land on our atom neon. And this would be our configuration for neon. And as you can see we have both of our orbital's or sorry sub levels the S and P sub levels fully filled up to the max. And so therefore we have no um paired electrons. And so we would say that neon is dia magnetic and therefore not capable of magnetism. And so we would expand our answer and say so. A beam of neon Adams would not deflect in a magnetic field. And so the stem Gerlach experiment will not work for neon, and this will be our final answer as to why the experiment won't work to complete this example. So I hope that everything I explained was clear. If you have any questions, please leave them down below and I will see everyone in the next practice video.

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