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  Home > JCE Print > Journal of Chemical Education > Issues > 1997  > June  >
Chemical Education Today
Letters
Why the 4s Orbital Is Occupied before the 3d
James L. Bills
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602

Cover
June 1997
Vol. 74 No. 6
p. 616

Full Text
In their article on 4s/3d occupation (J. Chem. Educ. 1996, 73, 498-503), Melrose and Scerri (MS) had on hand orbital energies e and Coulomb/exchange integrals J/K for most of the 3d atoms in the 4s23dn average-of-configuration (AoC). In an AoC, the lowest state in the configuration, given by Hund's rules, has its energy averaged with all the higher energies in the configuration. The data on hand for Cr and Cu were in the 4s13dn+1 AoC, so they devised their eq 21 solely for Cr and Cu.

Numerical values of the Cr and Cu 4s23dn AoC AO are available (Fischer, C. F. Atomic Data 1972, 4, 301), as are the e and Fn for d-d J/K (Fischer, C. F. Atom. Data Nuc. Tables 1973, 12, 87). The s-d J/K can be found by numerical integration. The Cu 4s23d9 AoC has only the 2D term, for which analytic orbitals are available (Tatewaki, H.; Sekiya, M. J. Chem. Phys. 1986, 85, 5895).

These sources were used to obtain the following e for the MS table.

 
es ed ed' (ed' - es)
Cr -0.242 -0.513 -0.112 0.130
Cu -0.285 -0.740 -0.140 0.145

Here (ed' - es) is the 4s23dn frozen-orbital approximation to DeltaEAoC for 4s23dn --> 4s13dn+1. MS hoped that (ed' - es) would be negative, as it is from their eq 21. For every atom, frozen 4s23dn AO give a value of (ed' - es) that is too high, and frozen 4s13dn+1 AO give a value that is too low. The average of the two values is close to the Hartree-Fock DeltaEAoC plotted by Vanquickenborne, Pierloot, and Devoghel, Inorg. Chem. 1989, 28, 1805.

For Cr, DeltaEAoC is approx. 0.035. This positive DeltaE between the two AoC gives no indication that between the lowest states in Cr 4s23d4 --> 4s13d5, DeltaE = -0.035. That information comes only from a study of the lowest states.

See author's reply.

More Information
*  Citation
Bills, James L. J. Chem. Educ. 1997 74 616.
*  Keywords
*  History
Created:
Last Updated:
July 28, 1999
June 23, 2005
Link to Author's Reply added (May 2004). Link to Article added (August 2004).
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