Shell Game by John Hawkhead

waterfall rainbows
gnats scribble probabilities
in atomic shells

by John Hawkhead

In atomic physics and chemistry, electron shells (and subshells) are thought of as a series of ascending orbits that electrons occupy around an atom’s nucleus. Shells correspond to principal quantum numbers or are labelled alphabetically with the letters used in X-ray notation. Each row on the periodic table of elements represents an electron shell.

Each shell can contain only a fixed number of electrons. The numbers of electrons that can occupy each shell and subshell arise from equations in quantum mechanics, which state that no two electrons in the same atom can have the same values of the four quantum numbers that describe an electron in an atom completely:

  • Principal quantum number (n)
  • Azimuthal quantum number (ℓ)
  • Magnetic quantum number (mℓ)
  • Spin Quantum number (ms)

Further reading:

‘Electron shells’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell

‘Quantum number’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/). Read more of John’s sciku here!

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