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Do you know how many valence electrons silicon has? Most people don’t.
In fact, most people don’t even know what valence electrons are. Valence electrons are the electrons in an atom that are involved in chemical bonding. They determine how reactive an atom is.
The Silicon Element
Silicon has four valence electrons, which means it is not very reactive. In this blog post, we will discuss the electron configuration of silicon and how it affects its reactivity.
The electron configuration of an atom is the arrangement of its electrons in shells. The first shell can hold up to two electrons, the second shell can hold up to eight electrons, and so on.
Silicon has a valence electron configuration of [Ne]. This means that it has one electron in the first shell and three electrons in the second shell. The third shell is full, so the fourth and fifth shells are empty.
Since silicon has four valence electrons, it can form four bonds with other atoms. It will usually lose one of its valence electrons to another atom in order to form a bond. This leaves it with a stable electron configuration of [Ar].
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Here’s a really nice video explaining more about Element Silicon:
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Silicon is not very reactive because it has a high electronegativity. Electronegativity is a measure of how much an atom attracts electrons to itself. The higher the electronegativity, the more reactive an atom is.
The electronegativity of silicon is about .54, which is lower than most other elements. This means that it is not very attracted to electrons and does not tend to form bonds with other atoms easily.
We hope this blog post has helped you understand the electron configuration of silicon and how it affects its reactivity. Thanks for reading!
Source: This post first appeared on https://veryceleb.com/