what do you mean by radial wave function and radial distribution function of hydrogen orbital?
Answers
The method of describing the shape of an orbital in terms of its projection of its wavefunction along an axis, as in the px orbital case above, is a way of describing the orientation dependent part of the wavefunction. That the wavefunction of the px orbital is orientationally dependent means that its projection is not the same along each of the cartesian axes.
The electronic wavefunction, as we have seen above, describes the distribution of the electron positions in terms of the distance of the electron from the nucleus, r, and the orientaion of the electron relative to the nucleus. We can separate the wavefunction into an orientationally dependent part, known as the angular wavefunction, and an orientationally independent part, which is known as the radial wavefunction.