Can someone please go thru step by step how the ion charge for copper is 2+?
The rules are a little different for the transition metals. It’s a little hard to explain, but they do tend to form ions with smaller charges than you’d expect based on the rules you’ve been taught for the main-group elements. For one thing, it takes way too much energy to form a +11 charge (it’s just too hard to get an electron away from something with a +10 charge). Basically, what happens is that the TM’s lose their s electrons first (despite the way you learn to fill up the electron configurations – again, not trivial to explain), and the formation of the resultant ions makes the d-electrons increasingly hard to remove. For that reason, since most transition metals have ns^2(n-1)^d electron configurations, they frequently stop at the 2+ charge, and that’s by far the most common charge for TM ions under normal circumstances. As it turns out, metal ions like Cu2+ bind to the electrons in other molecules (like water), giving them a share in those electrons so that they can appear to h
