I am trying to understand energy levels of electron configurations. I visited the NIST web site and discovered that the notation used here are called term symbols.
After reading corresponding wikipedia entry I worked through the carbon example in the "Term symbols for an electron configuration" section. So it appears to me that each of the (te) microstates [(in this case (62)=15), where t is number of slots in the outside subshell, and e is the number of electrons] will each have an assigned energy level, or term symbol - since in the end there are 15 1s distributed in three different matrices, but only 5 possible term symbols (1 term symbol for 5 microstates, 3 term symbols for 9 microstates, and 1 term symbol for 1 microstate). However, I don't see how a given microstate maps to a specific term symbol.
For example, ML=0 and MS=0 is true for 3 microstates, but how to determine which term symbols correspond to them? Does it even make sense to do this?
UPDATE:
Thanks gigacyan, for the detailed answer. By the wording I am not sure at the end if you mean that ML=0 and MS=0 can only have the 1S term. If that is true, then the following must be totally off, but I will take a shot anyway:
So are you saying that ANY given microstate cannot be assigned a term symbol (energy level), or that just certain microstates (such as the ML=0 and MS=0 case above) cannot be assigned since there are more than one term symbol possibility?
For example, it seems that when there is only one microstate for a given ML and MS combination, it is uniquely determined as long as it falls into a matrix that has only one term symbol - for carbon, say ML=2 and MS=0 (row 7 of 15 in the microstate table) then it falls into the 5x1 table, which must be 1D2.
But when there is only one microstate for a given ML and MS combination but it falls into a matrix with more than one term symbol - for carbon, say ML=1 and MS=1 (row 1 of 15 in the microstate table), it falls into the 3x3 matrix, which means that this microstate must be one of 3P2, 3P1, or 3P0, but it is not known which. Is this correct?
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