Question

What is shielding effect of inner electrons?

Answer 1

Shielding effect can be defined as a reduction in the nuclear charge on the electron cloud, due to a difference in the attraction forces of the electrons on the nucleus.

Explanation:

Due to the inner electrons in the electron cloud, the effective nuclear charge on the outer electrons is reduced.
This is what we call is Shielding effect.

We can estimate the effective nuclear charge on each electron by the following:

`Z_(ef) = Z - sigma` where, Where `Z` is the atomic number and `sigma` is the average number of electrons between the nucleus and the electron on which the effect of shielding is being studied.