Periodic Landscapes - Ionisation Energies
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Ionisation Energies

Here ‘ionisation’ refers to the amount of energy which is needed to prize away from an atom in the gas phase its most loosely held electron. The values are given for the chemical unit of a mole of atoms of each element.
Ionisation energy may be used to predict an element’s properties because the electron being removed is one of the outermost electrons, called valence electrons, which take part in chemical bonding. For example metallic elements generally have lower ionisation energies than non-metals.

The actual value of the ionisation energy for a particular element depends heavily on its position in the periodic table. A single ionisation energy is therefore less useful in accounting for chemical properties than observing the trends in ionisation energies going down a group or across a series.
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