Electronic configuration of the noble gases

The charge on the nucleus and the number of electrons in the valence shell determine the chemical properties of the atom. The electron configurations of the noble gases (except for that of helium) correspond to a valence shell containing eight electrons—a very stable configuration called an... 

What property do the noble gases share How do the electron configurations of the noble gases give them this shared property ... 

We learned in Chapter 2 that the noble gases rarely form chemical bonds. This can now be explained in terms of the stability of their electron configurations. The formation of chemical bonds requires atoms to gain, lose, or share electrons, and the electron configurations of the noble gases (displayed below) are so stable that their atoms do not easily undergo any of those changes. 

Worked example 1.6 The ground state electronic configurations of the noble gases... 

These elements attain a total of eight valence electrons, giving the valence-electron configurations of the noble gases Ne and Ar. 

The lack of reactivity for noble gases led to the proposal that the electronic configurations of the noble gases represented stable configurations. These configurations, usually consisting of eight electrons in the valence shell, can be represented in several useful ways. 

Note The trend shown here is based on the need to lose and gain electrons in order to match the electron configuration of the noble gases. 

The idea of the covalent bond was first suggested by the American physical chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875-1946) in 1916. He pointed out that the electron configuration of the noble gases appears to be a particularly stable one. Noble-gas atoms are themselves extremely unreactive. Moreover, as pointed out in Chapter 6, a great many monatomic ions have noble-gas structures. Lewis suggested that nonmetal atoms, by sharing electrons to form an electron-pairbond, can acquire a stable noble-gas structure. Consider,... 

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