These diagrams show the probability density of the electrons around a hydrogen nucleus, which is the simplest (and a pretty good in general) model for how electrons live around atom nuclei. The more dots, the denser the probability, aka: how likely or not one might find an electron in this particular position.
In the upper right corner, there's the psi(n, l, m) selector which lets you pick the geometry.
n is the "principal quantum number" which corresponds to "the gross energy level/frequency" of electron. The way to think about this (I think) is this: If you are plucking a string on a guitar, or play a wind instrument, the more nodes that it has, the higher the energy of the vibration. Similarly for electrons around atoms. As you pick diagrams with a higher n, you'll see more nodes (internal regions with zero density) in the distribution. These are also higher energy states. Generally, if you look carefully you should be able to find (n - 1) surfaces, though for the (n, 0, 0) diagrams some of these node surfaces are tiny spheres close to the nucleus, so you might not see them.
l is the angular quantum number. This number determines how many of those nodal surfaces are "not spherical". So in a (n, 1, X) diagram, you should eventually see a plane cutting through if you play around with the orientation; In an (n, 2, x) you should see two intersecting planes cutting through, or in some cases a cone (more on that later).
m is the magnetic quantum number, and presumes that the atom is sitting in a nonzero magnetic field, and selects for different energies that relative orientations in that magnetic field have. This splits the different possibilities based on direction relative to magnetic field, and not curve qualities (number of nodes; shape of nodes).
There's another quantum number, which is the "spin quantum number" that has to do with the Pauli Exclusion principle, that two electrons can share an orbit simultaneously. This doesn't really change the shape of the orbital, so I presume that's why it's not there.
(1, 0, 0) is possible, but probably not shown because it's boring.
As for why you could have a "plane" or a "cone"; the display coordinate systems are somewhat arbitrary, and as with most quantum mechanics, "reality" is actually a weighted linear sum (superposition) of all of these possibilities; so a "plane" and a "cone" are roughly equivalently "surfaces", but the cone is a linear combination of a bunch of planes rotated around a line but is selected because it's a convenient and easy basis component with the other "planes" to generate coverage of the vector space of all possibilities. To really butcher the explanation: It turns out that you have to play that "rotate trick" because the space of "all possible probability distributions" has a fixed dimension, and you run out of ways to chop up three dimensional spaces with planes, so you have to mash them together to get correct coverage of the space of distributions.
How this corresponds to the periodic table. The S block (left side) elements are mostly filling their (row, 0, 0) orbitals, then P block (right side) elements are filling their (row - 1, 1, _) orbitals. The transition metals are filling their (row - 2, 2, _) orbitals, and the inner transition metals are filling their (row - 3, 3, _) orbitals . Although it seems elegant, reasoning for the "row - X" and not "row" is a bit complicated, empirical and not theoretical, and if you'd like to understand why, look up "aufbau principle".
Edit: In this base the absolute value of the wave function is supposed to be rotational symmetric around the z axis.
[1] https://github.com/c0nrad/hydrogen/blob/master/hydrogen.cpp#...
> In this base the absolute value of the wave function is supposed to be rotational symmetric around the z axis.
For the D orbital?
Wouldn't the probability of finding an electron be spherically symmetric, regardless of the orbital number, if no external fields were present?
Edit: the Reddit discussion has more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/gt1set/interactive...
I never even know how to ask the question I want to ask, just like it's impossible to ask if the colors in the photograph of a planet are "real" or not. I've just given up and decided that all of space is in black and white except for Earth.
To define "look" you must say "look how", i.e. with what sense are you looking.
For atoms you can use gravity to look at them, or the electromagnetic force, or the strong force. And the atoms will look different each way.
I suppose you could define look as "how strongly will this test particle interact with the atom at this distance, using this force". But notice "how strongly" - there is no fixed boundary, the interaction just gets weaker (or less likely) as things get farther.
This is a nice system because the result is analytic (ignoring relativistic effects and assuming a point-like nucleus). Specifically, Ψ_{n,l,m}(r, θ, φ) = L_n(r) * Y_l^m(θ, φ), where L_n(r) is the n-th order Laguerre polynomial and Y_l^m(θ, φ) is the m-th spherical harmonic with angular momentum l.
From a chemical perspective, n indicates which electron "shell" you are in, l indicates which type of orbital (l=0 is an s-orbital, l=1 is a p-orbital, l=2 is a d-orbital, etc.), and m indicates which of the different orbitals within that shell having that angular momentum (e.g. p_x vs p_y vs p_z).
1. The fact that the function is easy to compute because there is an analytical solution to the ODE when the atom is simple enough tells precious little about what the picture actually represents.
2. The fact that the function you talk about has 6 parameters and this is a 3D visualization (3 degrees of freedom) is confusing.
3. The chemistry lesson about orbitals is also an interesting fact but still not properly correlated to the interactive depiction. Notoriously missing: where are m,n,l actually depicted in the story? Am I looking at one specific choice for those? What are the menu entries?
I think there is something that would truly help: if one would take a volume integral over a infinitesimal cube of the 3D interactive representation, what physical units would the result be in?
n,l,m are the triplet of numbers you can select in the top right. They're called quantum numbers, and they describe the state of this particular system, in particular the state of the electron.
Basically: n is how much energy the electron has (the higher, the further from the nucleus). l and m further describe which orbital the electron is in; l is related to the electron's angular momentum, m is related to its angle to the x-y plane in this visualisation. Only certain combinations of these numbers are allowed by physics (angular momentum, l, has to be smaller than energy, n, for example). n,l,m together describe the state of the electron inside the hydrogen atom.
So what are the dots? Basically, they're meant to represent a cloud. Where the cloud is denser, the electron has more measure; the electron is more there than in other places. Practically speaking, if you made a measurement to see where the electron was, your results would probabilistically correlate with the density of the cloud. The process whereby the electron goes from being a probabilistic cloud to a point particle interacting with your test particle back to a probabilistic cloud is called 'wave function collapse' in the Copenhagen interpretation, or, more generally, 'magic'.
(Or it's just how the universal wavefunction's branches look from the inside.)
A volume integral would be unitless, by definition: the value of the square-absolute-value of the wavefunction at any point (what's represented by this graph) is the probability of finding the electron at that point per cubic metre. A volume integral from negative to positive infinity in x, y, and z gives 1 (no units).
The Hamiltonian is an operator that describes the energy of a system. Eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian are quantum states, referred to as wave functions. The squared amplitude of a wave function is a probability distribution function. When discussing the wave functions of electrons, the probability amplitude is sometimes referred to as the electron density. You are looking at a sampling from the electron density of the wave functions of the 1-electron 1-nucleus Hamiltonian operator. There are different wave functions (different entries in the dropdown box at the top-right corner of the screen) because the Hamiltonian operator has more than one eigenfunction. Each eigenfunction is characterized by the 3 "quantum numbers": n, l, and m. "n" indicates the number of radial nodes -- areas of a given distance from the nucleus where the electron density is 0. "l" indicates the number of angular nodes -- areas arranged in a certain angular pattern around the nucleus where the electron density is 0.
> I think there is something that would truly help: if one would take a volume integral over a infinitesimal cube of the 3D interactive representation, what physical units would the result be in?
Number of electrons (possibly fractional, if you aren't sampling the whole space). For this particular Hamiltonian, the integral over all space should be numerically 1 for any given eigenfunction, since we are looking at the 1-electron Hamiltonian.
3. This hydrogen atom has a nucleus and one electron. Think of n as the energy level of that electron - electrons have discrete energy levels, so as n increases the electron occupies the next discrete energy available to it.
l is another quantized value which corresponds to what we call the orbital angular momentum of the electron, which partially determines the shape of the orbital. This is a big part of the visualization you see - as you change the value of l, we see different shapes, and if you increase the number of particles in the visualization, you get changes in those shapes. These different shells have names - s, p, d, etc - that correspond to the integer value of l - 0, 1, 2, etc.
Importantly, what's being graphed in the visualization is a solution to the specified wave function. It's a 3D probability map, effectively. Where there is a higher chance of the electron being located, the particles are more concentrated, whereas lower chance regions have lower populations of particles.
m is called the magnetic quantum number and can have integer values from -l to +l, and further specifies the particular state of the electron in its "shell" - s, p, d, etc again. If the wave function has n=2 and l=2, then it's in the d shell, and can have values of m from -2 to +2. The actual value of m determines the final "shape" of the orbital, again depicted as a probability map - every dot you see plotted can be a location of the electron, so plotting a lot of them based on the probability distribution gives you a visualization of the regions available to that electron.
So the menu entries are just values of n,l,m that aren't separated by commas.
I hope that clarifies some things!
Why is that a problem?
It's no different than defining a family of linear functions f_a,b(x) = a x + b and then letting the user pick values for the parameters a and b before plotting it onto the xy - plane.
There are many more visualizations that show total electron density rather than individual states. Though arguably far far too few, given how pervasively unsuccessfully these topics are taught.
If you'd like to explore, GPAW https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/gpaw/ can be useful. Here's a random example of use: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Engineering/Labs/Peterson/...
https://shaderpark.netlify.app/sculpture/-Lc8sSICWEgoYmFyBm4...
I would suggest, though, that some contour lines (or translucent shells?) might help make the point more apparent to someone trying to learn about the shapes (which I suppose is the point).
After all, the point is to grasp something visual about it, and just vaguely discernible clouds of points don't probably convey that sufficiently, although they are accurate of course.
