Basis atomic orbital occupied

Even with the minimal basis set of atomic orbitals used m most sem i-empirical calculatitm s. the n urn ber of molecii lar orbitals resulting from an SCFcalciilation exceeds the num ber of occupied molecular orbitals by a factor of about two. The n um ber of virtual orbitals in an ah initio calculation depends on the basis set used in this calculation. 

Ihe one-electron orbitals are commonly called basis functions and often correspond to he atomic orbitals. We will label the basis functions with the Greek letters n, v, A and a. n the case of Equation (2.144) there are K basis functions and we should therefore xpect to derive a total of K molecular orbitals (although not all of these will necessarily 3e occupied by electrons). The smallest number of basis functions for a molecular system vill be that which can just accommodate all the electrons in the molecule. More sophisti- ated calculations use more basis functions than a minimal set. At the Hartree-Fock limit he energy of the system can be reduced no further by the addition of any more basis unctions however, it may be possible to lower the energy below the Hartree-Fock limit ay using a functional form of the wavefunction that is more extensive than the single Slater determinant. 

J Chem. Phys., 52, 431 (1970)] is a relatively inexpensive one and can be used for calculations on quite large molecules. It is minimal in the sense of having the smallest number of functions per atom required to describe the occupied atomic orbitals of that atom. This is not exactly true, since one usually considers Is, 2s, and 2p, i.e., five functions, to construct a minimal basis set for Li and Be, for example, even though the 2p orbital is not occupied in these atoms. The 2sp (2s and 2p), 3sp, 4sp, 3d,. .., etc. orbitals are always lumped together as a shell , however. The minimal basis set thus consists of 1 function for H and He, 5 functions for Li to Ne, 9 functions for Na to Ar, 13 functions for Kand Ca, 18 functions for Sc to Kr,. .., etc. Because the minimal basis set is so small, it generally can not lead to quantitatively accurate results. It does, however, contain the essentials of chemical bonding and many useful qualitative results can be obtained. 

The CPHF equations are linear and can be determined by standard matrix operations. The size of the U matrix is the number of occupied orbitals times the number of virtual orbitals, which in general is quite large, and the CPHF equations are normally solved by iterative methods. Furthermore, as illustrated above, the CPHF equations may be formulated either in an atomic orbital or molecular orbital basis. Although the latter has computational advantages in certain cases, the former is more suitable for use in connection with direct methods (where the atomic integrals are calculated as required), as discussed in Section 3.8.5. 

The raw output of a molecular structure calculation is a list of the coefficients of the atomic orbitals in each LCAO (linear combination of atomic orbitals) molecular orbital and the energies of the orbitals. The software commonly calculates dipole moments too. Various graphical representations are used to simplify the interpretation of the coefficients. Thus, a typical graphical representation of a molecular orbital uses stylized shapes (spheres for s-orbitals, for instance) to represent the basis set and then scales their size to indicate the value of the coefficient in the LCAO. Different signs of the wavefunctions are typically represented by different colors. The total electron density at any point (the sum of the squares of the occupied wavefunctions evaluated at that point) is commonly represented by an isodensity surface, a surface of constant total electron density. 

Figure 4.105 A schematic perturbative-analysis diagram for occupied valence MOs (center) of PtH42 (B3LYP/LANL2DZ level), showing tie-lines for analysis in terms of AO basis functions (left) versus NAOs (right). (A tie-line is shown when the AO or NAO contributes at least 5% to the connected MO.) Note the much smaller number of contributing orbitals, the sparser tie-line patterns, and the more realistic physical range of atomic orbital energies for NAOs than for standard Gaussian-basis AOs.

The simple orbital basis expansion method which is used in the implementation of most models of molecular electronic structure consists of expanding each R as a linear combination of determinants of a set of (usually) atom-centred functions of one or two standard forms. In particular most qualitative and semi-quantitative theories restrict the terms in this expansion to consist of the (approximate) occupied atomic orbitals of the constituent atoms of the molecule. There are two types of symmetry constraint implicit in this technique. 

Polarization functions are best defined as atomic orbitals which are not occupied in the ground states of atoms due to symmetry, e.g. p, d orbitals at H or d, f orbitals at O atoms. They provide an additional flexibility of the basis set in the molecule, where the symmetry is significantly lower than in the atom. 

The distribution of the molecular orbitals can be derived from the patterns of symmetry of the atomic orbitals from which the molecular orbitals are constructed. The orbitals occupied by valence electrons form a basis for a representation of the symmetry group of the molecule. Linear combination of these basis orbitals into molecular orbitals of definite symmetry species is equivalent to reduction of this representation. Therefore analysis of the character vector of the valence-orbital representation reveals the numbers of molecular orbitals... 

The dimension of the secular determinant for a given molecule depends on the choice of basis set. EHT adopts two critical conventions. First, all core electrons are ignored. It is assumed that core electrons are sufficiently invariant to differing chemical environments that changes in their orbitals as a function of environment are of no chemical consequence, energetic or otherwise. All modern semiempirical methodologies make this approximation. In EHT calculations, if an atom has occupied d orbitals, typically the highest occupied level of d orbitals is considered to contribute to the set of valence orbitals. 

At the SCF or MCSCF level, the basis set requirements are fairly simple. We can imagine that the occupied molecular orbitals are given as a simple linear combination of atomic orbitals this corresponds to a minimal basis set. The results so obtained are fairly crude, but by admitting extra functions to represent the atomic orbitals more flexibly (split-valence, double zeta, etc) we can obtain a much better description. However, some effects require going beyond the occupied atomic orbitals ... 

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