Question

what is the difference between orbits and orbitals?

Answer 1

The terms were used relative to the behavior of an hydrogen atom for example.
Niels Bohr described the motion of the electron relative to the nucleus as planetary orbits.His model of the Hydrogen atoms described the orbit as being unique and discrete.

The difficulty with his model is that the left out the temperature of an atom.
Since atomic temperature changes continuously, the electron could not live in the same orbit continuously . Hence it would move statistically within a volume of space called orbital.

Thus an Orbit implies rotation relative to another mass. An Orbital implies a disorderly rotation around another mass.
The word Orbital used as an adjective means the type motion in an orbit.

Answer 2

An orbit is a trajectory, meaning position and velocity are fully determined at each instant of time. As you probably know, that kind of knowledge about a subatomic particle is forbidden by the uncertainty principle. Hence, it is not possible to know the orbits of subatomic particles.

However, it is possible to know the probability that a particle is in a given location of space. The name "orbital" was coined to describe the most complete possible description of where a particle can be, given that you know its energy, its angular momentum, and the projection of its angular momentum along any axis -- which is the maximum amount of information you can know about a particle in a central potential in a stationary state, e.g. an electron in an atom with known energy.

The name comes from the fact that the suffix "-al" means "like an X, but not an X." Hence, an orbital is like an orbit, but not an orbit. In fact, all that an orbit and an orbital have in common is that they both describe the locations of an orbiting body (a body that travels around another body, to which it is attracted).

Answer 3

then in describing the quantum numbers of electron, why do we use both principal quantum which is the orbit number as well as azimuthal quantum number which is nothing but orbitals.?

Answer 4

http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch6/quantum.html
refer this link,,,