Born-Oppenheimer approximation molecular orbitals

The total energy in an Molecular Orbital calculation is the net result of electronic kinetic energies and the interactions between all electrons and atomic cores in the system. This is the potential energy for nuclear motion in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (see page 32). 

According to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, the motions of electrons are much more rapid than those of the nuclei (i.e. the molecular vibrations). Promotion of an electron to an antibonding molecular orbital upon excitation takes about 10-15 s, which is very quick compared to the characteristic time for molecular vi-... 

Under the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, two major methods exist to determine the electronic structure of molecules The valence bond (VB) and the molecular orbital (MO) methods (Atkins, 1986). In the valence bond method, the chemical bond is assumed to be an electron pair at the onset. Thus, bonds are viewed to be distinct atom-atom interactions, and upon dissociation molecules always lead to neutral species. In contrast, in the MO method the individual electrons are assumed to occupy an orbital that spreads the entire nuclear framework, and upon dissociation, neutral and ionic species form with equal probabilities. Consequently, the charge correlation, or the avoidance of one electron by others based on electrostatic repulsion, is overestimated by the VB method and is underestimated by the MO method (Atkins, 1986). The MO method turned out to be easier to apply to complex systems, and with the advent of computers it became a powerful computational tool in chemistry. Consequently, we shall concentrate on the MO method for the remainder of this section. 

In the discussion of both the hyperspherical method and the molecular orbital method we assumed that the motion in the Rb or R direction was slow. While in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation the slowness is generally thought to arise from the much higher mass of the nucleii, as pointed out by Feagin and Briggs,22 it is probably the repulsive nature of the internuclear potential which allows the separability. In other words, the success of these methods in treating He is due to the interelectronic repusion of the l/r12 potential. 

In molecular orbital (MO) theory, which is the most common implementation of QM used by chemists, electrons are distributed around the atomic nuclei until they reach a so-called self-consistent field (SCF), that is, until the attractive and repulsive forces between all the particles (electrons and nuclei) are in a steady state, and the energy is at a minimum. An SCF calculation yields the electronic wave function 4C (the electronic motion being separable from nuclear motion thanks to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation). This is the type of wave function usually referred to in the literature and in the rest of this chapter. 

Ab initio quantum mechanical (QM) calculations represent approximate efforts to solve the Schrodinger equation, which describes the electronic structure of a molecule based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (in which the positions of the nuclei are considered fixed). It is typical for most of the calculations to be carried out at the Hartree—Fock self-consistent field (SCF) level. The major assumption behind the Hartree-Fock method is that each electron experiences the average field of all other electrons. Ab initio molecular orbital methods contain few empirical parameters. Introduction of empiricism results in the various semiempirical techniques (MNDO, AMI, PM3, etc.) that are widely used to study the structure and properties of small molecules. 

There are two reasons why so much is unknown. First, at high densities three (and even four) body forces are important. This is particularly so when chemically reactive atoms are present. Then, even for two-body forces, the strongly repulsive regime is not well understood and, in addition, close in, as one approaches the united atom limit, there is considerable promotion of molecular orbitals. This is a universal mechanism for electronic excitation which means a breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for close collisions. 

When extending the molecular orbital concept developed for the monoelec-tronic species H2 to polyelectronic diatomic molecules, we start by acknowledging the role of two fundamental approximations (a) one associated with the existence of two nuclei as attractive centres, namely the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, as already encountered in H2" and (b) the other related to the concept of the orbital when two or more electrons are present, that is the neglect of the electron coulomb correlation, as already discussed on going from mono- to polyelectronic atoms. Within the orbital approach, an additional feature when comparing to H2" is the exchange energy directly associated with the Pauli principle. 

The Born-Oppenheimer approximation (see Section 6.1) treats the motion of electrons and nuclei on very different time scales. The electrons, being much less massive, move much more rapidly than the nuclei in a molecule. In the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we consider the nuclei to be frozen at particular locations and calculate the electronic energy levels and wave functions (molecular orbitals) for the rapidly moving electrons (see Chapter 6). We find that the allowed... 

There are many methods that are available to solve the time-independent Schrodinger equation for molecular systems within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The emphasis in this section is on those methods that have been used or would be suitable for use with hybrid potentials. Three classes are considered — molecular orbital (MO) methods, density functional the-... 

CSFs into the wavefunction expansion. Although unattainable in molecular calculations, the second limiting case, corresponding to full Cl for a complete orbital set, is called the complete Cl expansion s. The eigenvalues of the complete Cl expansion are the exact energies within the clamped-atomic-nucleus Born-Oppenheimer approximation. A correspondence may then be established with the bracketing theorem between the lowest eigenvalues of a limited CSF expansion and those of the exact complete Cl expansion. This is illustrated schematically in Fig. 2. 

The theory of the chemical bond is one of the clearest and most informative examples of an explanatory phenomenon that probably occurs in some form or other in many sciences (psychology comes to mind) the semiautonomous, nonfundamental, fundamentally based, approximate theory (S ANFFBAT for short). Chemical bonding is fundamentally a quantum mechanical phenomenon, yet for all but the simplest chemical systems, a purely quantum mechanical treatment of the molecule is infeasible especially prior to recent computational developments, one could not write down the correct Hamiltonian and solve the Schrodinger equation, even with numerical methods. Immediately after the introduction of the quantum theory, systems of approximation began to appear. The Born Oppenheimer approximation assumed that nuclei are fixed in position the LCAO method assumed that the position wave functions for electrons in molecules are linear combinations of electronic wave functions for the component atoms in isolation. Molecular orbital theory assumed a characteristic set of position wave functions for the several electrons in a molecule, systematically related to corresponding atomic wave functions. 

Quantum Mechanics (QM). The objective of QM is to describe the spatial positions of electrons and nuclei. The most commonly implemented QM method is the molecular orbital (MO) theory, in which electrons are allowed to flow around fixed nuclei (the Born-Oppenheimer approximation) until the electrons reach a self-consistent field (SCF). The nuclei are then moved, iteratively, until the energy of the system can go no lower. This energy minimization process is called geometry optimization. 

We shall begin with a brief sketch of the standard ab initio molecular orbital (MO) theory that deals with an isolated molecule, since this is a fundamental part of chemical reaction analysis. [5] A molecule consists of M nuclei and n electrons. Applying the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, in which electrons are moving around the spatially fixed nuclei, electronic hamiltonian of the system (Heiec) expressed in atomic unit is given by... 

The material in this chapter is largely organized around the molecular properties that contribute to electron transfer processes in simple transition metal complexes. To some degree these molecular properties can be classified as functions of either (i) the nuclear coordinates (i.e., properties that depend on the spatial orientation and separation, and the vibrational characteristics) of the electron transfer system or (ii) the electronic coordinates of the system (orbital and spin properties). This partitioning of the physical parameters of the system into nuclear and electronic contributions, based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, is not rigorous and even in this approximation the electronic coordinates are a function of the nuclear coordinates. The types of systems that conform to expectation at the weak coupling limit will be discussed after some necessary preliminaries and discussion of formalisms. Applications to more complex, extended systems are mentioned at the end of the chapter. 

The Slater determinant is the central entity in molecular orbital theory. The exact -electron wave function of a stationary molecule in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation is a 4-dimensional object that depends on the three spatial coordinates and a spin coordinate of the N electrons in the system. This object is of course too complicated for any practical application and is, in first approximation, replaced by a product of N orthonormal 4-dimensional functions that each depend on the coordinates of only one of the electrons in the system. 

The term "ab initio means "from first principles" it does not mean "exact" or "true". In ab initio molecular orbital theory, we develop a series of well-defined approximations that allow an approximate solution to the Schrodinger equation. We calculate a total wavefunc-tion and individual molecular orbitals and their respective energies, without any empirical parameters. Below, we outline the necessary approximations and some of the elements and principles of quantum mechanics that we must use in our calculations, and then provide a summary of the entire process. Along with defining an important computational protocol, this approach will allow us to develop certain concepts that will be useful in later chapters, such as spin and the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. 

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