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Periodic trends: why the biggest atoms hold on the weakest

Your guide: Miss SanaCounts atoms the way you count rupees: carefully.

The problem

Caesium is one of the biggest atoms in the table. You would expect a big atom to be strong. Yet caesium gives away its outer electron more easily than almost any other element.

Think of mobile signal. Next to the tower it is strong; far away, behind a few walls, it drops. The nucleus is the tower, distance is the size of the atom, and the inner electrons are the walls.

The two trends: atomic radius decreases across a period and increases down a group. Ionization energy does the opposite: it increases across a period and decreases down a group.

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