[BLANK_AUDIO] The ionization energy, or in this case the

first ionization energy, is the energy needed to remove one

electron from a neutral atom. So here's a generic atom A, it can be any
element. Okay, so A has the same number of
electrons as it does protons over here on the left. So it's a number of electrons
equals
number of protons. Okay, that is really bad hand writing, but
that's okay. You can read it, I'm sure. We are going to put some energy, the
ionization energy amount into the atom. So this number, this is an amount of
energy that we're putting in. Amount of energy, that we are adding.
So we're putting it into the system. Okay, and because of that extra energy,
the atoms has to react somewhow. And one of the ways it can react, the
most, the most common way for it to react, is to for the electron to move to higher
energy
stage, which in an atom is further away from the
nucleus, right? So if we put exactly the right amount of
energy in, the ionization energy, which is an amount
of energy we can measure. Then what happens is one electron is
ejected by the atom. Okay, and the atom becomes positively
charged. This is one of the things that happens
when you get a medical diagnostic x-ray, if you've ever had one
because they thought you had a broken bone, for example. Okay, this is one of the
things that
happens, is those x-rays, very high energy waves, they hit your body's tissue and
some of the tissue in your body ejects
electrons. Okay? And it depends on what type of element
that particular tissue is composed of. How many electrons are ejected from that
particular type of tissue? Well, for metals, there's a small first ionization
energy. Doesn't actually take as much energy to
eject an electron from a metal It's easy to remove the electron when we
compare that to a non-metal. A non-metal has a relatively large first
ionization energy. It's difficult to remove electrons from
non-metals. So the trend for the ionization energy,
the first ionization energy now, taking the
electrons away from neutral atoms is that it takes more energy to take electrons
away
from non-metals than it does for metals. Now, if you know anything about Human
Biology and you probably know more than I do, because I certainly do not
know very much. I did try to take my colleague Mohamed
Noor's genetics and evolution course there which
I enjoyed tremendously. But even after I did that you probably still know more
about Biology than I do. You probably know that your bones, your
skeleton is, has a lot of the element calcium in it. Now it's compounds of calcium,
but there's
a lot of the element calcium in your bones. And other tissue in your body is
comprised mo, more of non-metals, there's water,
there's carbon, right? There's proteins, there's oxygen. So when you get an x-ray,
think about which tissue shows
up the brightest on the x-ray. The tissue that ejects the most electrons
is the tissue that has the smallest first
ionization energy, which is the calcium, the metal that's in
your body. And so the bones show up brightly on the
x-ray, other tissue not as bright. And it's a very good diagnostic way to see
if you have a fracture in your bone. Because if there's a little fracture
there'd be a dark area where there's not any calcium. Isn't that cool? But that's
also why you shouldn't have
more x-rays than you need, right? And we've, we've gotten into a situation with the
health community and I'm not an expert certainly in, in recommendations for
health, but they've got into a situation where they
determine that sometimes they take so many x-rays of
a patient, perhaps a cancer, a lung cancer patient for example, that the
x-rays themselves probably start contributing to
more cancer forming. Because the x-rays do damage your tissue. Every time you get
an x-ray, okay, you put in ionizing energy into your
body, and electrons are being ejected. Isn't that cool? Chemistry is so cool.
There's so many things you can explain
with chemistry. All right. Let's look at some actual ionization
energies. This is from a book I used to teach with. And you see carbon, we're a
carbon-based
life form, right? A lot of our tissue, our DNA, and our
proteins, and our fats, carbohydrates, have carbon backbones.
So we can see how much energy it takes to remove one electron from the outermost
orbital of a carbon atom. Now, I've done something a little fancier
in this diagram, right? And this diagram is showing more
complicated types of orbitals, is labeling them 2s or 2p. The two is from the
period that it's in,
the row. These, all these are second period
elements. The s or the p has something to do with the shape, describes the shape of
the
orbital. We are going to learn more about that later, don't get
bogged down with that. The electrons that are shown here in this
actual ionization energy graph, which again, I said came
from a textbook. This is not my graph, it's my friend Denis
Wirtz's graph. The actual ionization energies here are
only for the ones that are in the outermost shell. There are other electrons for
fluorine,
for example, fluorine doesn't have just five electrons,
it's got nine electrons. So there's some lower energy electrons for
fluorine down here, right? In a 1S and a 2S orbital.
And I don't have those drawn here. Because, when it comes to the first
ionization energy, the only thing we care about is removing the
highest energy electron of fluorine. How much energy does that take? Well, they've
measured it. And for one mole of fluorine, it takes
1,681 kilojoules to remove a mole of electrons from a mole
of fluorine atoms. So I'm measuring this distance really. Here's the distance up to
the energy of
zero, you see that? All these energies are negative. See how they're all negative?
Because this is an interaction between
protons of the nucleus, like here's lithium, and
negatively charged electrons. Lithium takes the smallest amount of energy to
ionize,
to make lithium one plus, so after the electron left, once the electron gets
up here to the zero value, right? Once it gets way up here, it can no longer
feel the positive pull of its nucleus. It can't tell that there's any positive
charges down there in the direction of the nucleus, so it
just floats away. So for the metal, for the lithium, it
doesn't take as much energy to get the electron to no longer be
associated with that atom. It takes more energy to do that for the
non-metal, for the fluorine. Do you see how that works? And what I'm doing here is
I'm comparing
the size of these red distances. These, these, I can measure actually a
distance in energy. Here I measured, it's 520 for lithium, do you see that?
All right, now it's your turn to try one. Are you ready? Here are three fictional
atoms. Okay, so three different atoms, X, Y, and
Z. Y is not itrium, okay they're just all
fictional, X, Y and Z. And this is where, these are their
outermost electrons. So Z, you see, I've shown two sets of
electrons so this would be the outermost one right
here, right? Here's the outermost, we just circle it,
here's the outermost one for Y and here's the outermost one for
X. I want you to put these atoms in order of
increasing first ionization energy. Right? So what you're going to be doing is
[UNKNOWN], okay, I've got the smallest first
ionization energy. Right?
And you just list something. And that's less than the one that's in the
middle, which is less than the one with the largest first ionization energy.
All right. So go ahead and do that. Rank them. Which one has the smallest,
sometimes
people say the lowest, although I find that confuses students, which one
has the smallest amount of energy necessary to remove the
outermost electron and which one has the largest amount of energy needed to
remove the outermost electron. Okay, now that you've ranked them, go
ahead and put in your answer for which one has the
smallest first ionization energy. Right? Answer this question. You've ranked them
all, now which one's
the smallest? Wonderful. Hopefully you can see, looking back at it
now, that if the ionization energy is getting
the electrons up here to some value of zero energy, where
they can no longer feel the positive pull of
the nucleus. That's a pretty short trip for the
electron that's outermost of Z. That only needs to go that distance in
energy. I don't have units on my free energy over
here, but it doesn't matter what the units are. All of these are on the same axis,
so it's
the same units for all of them. Y has a slightly larger trip, and X has
the largest trip of all. So the smallest first ionization energy
was Z, followed by Y, followed by X. You see how that works? Wonderful. Now, I said
that this lecture is about
periodic trends. So let's look at the periodicity of
ionization energy. So to review the periodic trend for
ionization energy, we can examine this plot of ionization energy as
a function of atomic number. So ionization energy is on the Y-axis, right, it
increases as we go higher on the
graph. Atomic number is on the X-axis. Some of the elements are labeled. But even
the ones that aren't labeled, you
can figure out what they are just by looking up their atomic
number on the periodic table. Hydrogen is, of course, right here,
because that's got an atomic number of one. So we could do that for all of them all
the way across. So, this must be lithium, down here, if I was going to label
things, right?
This is lithium, right here, and then the ionization H energy increases as
I go across the second period, okay, up to a peak of neon.
So here's, so helium is the first peak. I'm going to make that blue, I think.
Helium is the first peak, neon is the
second peak. And then, when I get down to the next valley, which
element do you think it is? So I've gone across, this is the second
period. Then I, then I get to the third period
which starts with sodium. And then I move across the third period
until I get to argon, which is the next peak. Once I get to the fourth period,
where
potassium is the metal. Then I have to go across the transition
metals. So this little flat part here, that peaks
right there, that's going across the D-block the
transition metals. And then I go back to what's called the
p-block, back to the non-metals, and I, and I end up with a
maximum at Krypton again. So what do you notice is happening if I'm
doing a trend? What's this trend up here? You see it?
Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon. Those are the ones that are at the peak
for this trend in ionization energy. And it's the first ionization energy,
actually. Because you can, actually there's another
trend for removing the second electron from a
positively charged cation. But we're looking at the first ionization
energy here. So you can see the peaks are the inert
gases. Down in the valleys, I had the alkali
metals, right? And I can see similar types of patterns for
transition metals. So here is the first row that has
transition metals in it, if you will. And here's the next one further down.
Okay? And then I can see them again here.
What do you think is right here? What's right here where it's flat?
What do you think is there? Well, remember down underneath the
periodic table, if you take a look at it there's the lanthanides
there. So the lathanides don't change their
ionization energy very much as we go across the atomic numbers, but
they all have a fairly low ionization energy, which
means it's fairly easy to remove electrons from all the metals
that are the lathanide. It's fairly easy to remove electrons from lithium and
calcium and magnesium and
other metals. Iron, copper, lead, tin, all those species are down here at
low ionization energy. It's relatively easy to remove electrons
from them to make them into what type of ion? So if I remove an electron, this is
review, if I remove an electron from an atom, remove one electron from a neutral
atom, what type of ion do I make? A cation or an anion? Wonderful. Thank you for
joining me for this lecture
on An Introduction to Periodic Trends. And hopefully, you can see that orbital
energy and ionization energy kind of fit
together, don't they? Tune into the next lecture to learn about
two more periodic trends; electronegativity and atomic radii.
Thanks.