How many valence electrons does a neutral silicon atom have?
1 Answer
You can use the position of silicon on the periodic table, or its ground state electron configuration to determine the number of valence electrons.
Explanation:
The element Silicon (Si), is in group 14/IVA on the periodic table. All of the elements in this group have four valence electrons.
A neutral silicon atom has equal numbers of protons and electrons. The number of protons is its atomic number, which is 14. So the number of electrons is 14. With this information, we can write the ground state (lowest energy) electron configuration for silicon as
Valence electrons occupy the highest energy s and p sublevels in the representative elements. So you can see by the electron configuration, that silicon has two 3s electrons and two 3p electrons, which gives a total of four valence electrons.
So you can determine the number of valence electrons for silicon by its position on the periodic table, or by writing its ground state electron configuration.
