Dissociation orbital description

Figure 11.1 shows the bond dissociation curve at the HF level with the STO-3G, 3-21G, 6-31G(d,p), cc-pVDZ and cc-pVQZ basis sets. The total energy drops considerably upon going from the STO-3G to the 3-21G and again to the 6-3IG(d,p) basis. This is primarily due to the improved description of the oxygen Is-orbital. The two different... 

In this section we give a simple and qualitative description of chemisorption in terms of molecular orbital theory. It should provide a feeling for why some atoms such as potassium or chlorine acquire positive or negative charge upon adsorption, while other atoms remain more or less neutral. We explain qualitatively why a molecule adsorbs associatively or dissociatively, and we discuss the role of the work function in dissociation. The text is meant to provide some elementary background for the chapters on photoemission, thermal desorption and vibrational spectroscopy. We avoid theoretical formulae and refer for thorough treatments of chemisorption to the literature [2,6-8],... 

A measure of the ability of an atom within a molecule to attract bonding electrons toward itselP . For a bond between two atoms of different electronegativities, the electron molecular orbital cloud is not symmetric, and the atom with the higher electronegativity attracts the larger proportion of the cloud. The most popular quantitative description was presented by Pauling, who based his scale on bond dissociation energies (measured in kcal per mol). 

Figures 7 and 8 plot deviations of total energies from FCI results for the various methods. It is clear that the CASSCF/L-CTD theory performs best out of all the methods smdied. (We recall that although the canonical transformation operator exp A does not explicitly include single excitations, the main effects are already included via the orbital relaxation in the CASSCF reference.) The absolute error of the CASSCF/L-CTD theory at equilibrium—1.57 mS (6-31G), 2.26 m j (cc-pVDZ)—is slightly better than that of CCSD theory—1.66m j (6-31G), 3.84 m j (cc-pVDZ) but unlike for the CCSD and CCSDT theories, the CASSCF/L-CTD error stays quite constant as the molecule is pulled apart while the CC theories exhibit a nonphysical turnover and a qualitatively incorrect dissociation curve. The largest error for the CASSCF/L-CTD method occurs at the intermediate bond distance of 1.8/ with an error of —2.34m (6-3IG), —2.42 mE j (cc-pVDZ). Although the MRMP curve is qualitatively correct, it is not quantitatively correct especially in the equilibrium region, with an error of 6.79 mEfi (6-3IG), 14.78 mEk (cc-pVDZ). One measure of the quality of a dissociation curve is the nonparallelity error (NPE), the absolute difference between the maximum and minimum deviations from the FCI energy. For MRMP the NPE is 4mE (6-3IG), 9mE, (cc-pVDZ), whereas for CASSCF/ L-CTD the NPE is 5 mE , (6-3IG), 6 mE , (cc-pVDZ), showing that the CASSCF/L-CTD provides a quantitative description of the bond breaking with a nonparallelity error competitive with that of MRMP.

The second approach to treating nondynamical correlation has an air of the ostrich about it ignore the spin symmetry of the wave function and use unrestricted Haxtree-Fock (UHF) theory as the single configuration description [7]. Since the UHF wave function comprises one spin-orbital for each electron, a molecular UHF wave function should dissociate to atomic UHF wave functions, for example. This is certainly not the case for spin-restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) molecules and atoms in general. And there is an attractive simplicity about UHF — no active orbitals to identify, and so forth. However, where nondynamical correlation would be important in an RHF-based treatment, the UHF method will suffer from severe spin-contamination, while where nondynamical correlation is not important the RHF solution may be lower in energy than any broken-symmetry UHF solution, so potential curves and surfaces may have steps or kinks where the spin symmetry is broken in the UHF treatment. 

The He2A 2 state has nearly the same dissociation energy as the He (22J ion. This supports the idea that the excited He2 configurations can be described at small interatomic distances as an inner He core with an outer Rydberg orbital. This description is less quantitative for the heavier rare-gas pairs. The unusual maxima result either from curve crossing (e.g., C S ) or as for the state by a changeover in the... 

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