Topic summary
P orbital
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Atomic orbital.
Shapes of orbitals
The shapes of p, d and f orbitals are described verbally here and shown graphically in the Orbitals table below. The three p orbitals for n = 2 have the form of two ellipsoids with a point of tangency at the nucleus (the two-lobed shape is sometimes referred to as a "dumbbell"—there are two lobes pointing in opposite directions from each other). The three p orbitals in each shell are oriented at right angles to each other, as determined by their respective linear combination of values of mℓ. The overall result is a lobe pointing along each direction of the primary axes.