Electrons motion

To first order, the dispersion (a-a) interaction is independent of the structure in a condensed medium and should be approximately pairwise additive. Qualitatively, this is because the dispersion interaction results from a small perturbation of electronic motions so that many such perturbations can add without serious mutual interaction. Because of this simplification and its ubiquity in colloid and surface science, dispersion forces have received the most significant attention in the past half-century. The way dispersion forces lead to long-range interactions is discussed in Section VI-3 below. Before we present this discussion, it is useful to recast the key equations in cgs/esu units and SI units in Tables VI-2 and VI-3. 

The Debye model is more appropriate for the acoustic branches of tire elastic modes of a hanuonic solid. For molecular solids one has in addition optical branches in the elastic wave dispersion, and the Einstein model is more appropriate to describe the contribution to U and Cj from the optical branch. The above discussion for phonons is suitable for non-metallic solids. In metals, one has, in addition, the contribution from the electronic motion to Uand Cy. This is discussed later, in section (A2.2.5.6T... 

The simplest case arises when the electronic motion can be considered in temis of just one electron for example, in hydrogen or alkali metal atoms. That electron will have various values of orbital angular momentum described by a quantum number /. It also has a spin angular momentum described by a spin quantum number s of d, and a total angular momentum which is the vector sum of orbital and spin parts with... 

The close-coupling equations are also applicable to electron-molecule collision but severe computational difficulties arise due to the large number of rotational and vibrational channels that must be retained in the expansion for the system wavefiinction. In the fixed nuclei approximation, the Bom-Oppenlieimer separation of electronic and nuclear motion pennits electronic motion and scattering amplitudes f, (R) to be detemiined at fixed intemuclear separations R. Then in the adiabatic nuclear approximation the scattering amplitude for ... 

My own research efforts [4] have, for many years, involved taking into account such non-Bom-Oppen-heimer couplings, especially in cases where vibration/rotation energy transferred to electronic motions causes... 

With tlie development of femtosecond laser teclmology it has become possible to observe in resonance energy transfer some apparent manifestations of tire coupling between nuclear and electronic motions. For example in photosyntlietic preparations such as light-harvesting antennae and reaction centres [32, 46, 47 and 49] such observations are believed to result eitlier from oscillations between tire coupled excitonic levels of dimers (generally multimers), or tire nuclear motions of tire cliromophores. This is a subject tliat is still very much open to debate, and for extensive discussion we refer tire reader for example to [46, 47, 50, 51 and 55]. A simplified view of tire subject can nonetlieless be obtained from tire following semiclassical picture. 

Both the BO dynamics and Gaussian wavepacket methods described above in Section n separate the nuclear and electronic motion at the outset, and use the concept of potential energy surfaces. In what is generally known as the Ehrenfest dynamics method, the picture is still of semiclassical nuclei and quantum mechanical electrons, but in a fundamentally different approach the electronic wave function is propagated at the same time as the pseudoparticles. These are driven by standard classical equations of motion, with the force provided by an instantaneous potential energy function... 

The separation of nuclear and electronic motion may be accomplished by expanding the total wave function in functions of the election coordinates, r, parametrically dependent on the nuclear coordinates... 

Information about the structure of a molecule can frequently be obtained from observations of its absorption spectrum. The positions of the absorption bands due to any molecule depend upon its atomic and electronic configuration. To a first approximation, the internal energy E oi a, molecule can be regarded as composed of additive contributions from the electronic motions within the molecule (Et), the vibrational motions of the constituent atoms relative to one another E ), and the rotational motion of the molecule as a whole (Ef) ... 

The treatment of electronic motion is treated in detail in Sections 2, 3, and 6 where molecular orbitals and configurations and their computer evaluation is covered. The vibration/rotation motion of molecules on BO surfaces is introduced above, but should be treated in more detail in a subsequent course in molecular spectroscopy. 

In currently available software, the Hamiltonian above is nearly never used. The problem can be simplified by separating the nuclear and electron motions. This is called the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The Hamiltonian for a molecule with stationary nuclei is... 

Electrons from a spark are accelerated backward and forward rapidly in the oscillating electromagnetic field and collide with neutral atoms. At atmospheric pressure, the high collision frequency of electrons with atoms induces chaotic electron motion. The electrons gain rapidly in kinetic energy until they have sufficient energy to cause ionization of some gas atoms. 

Assuming that the current in the gas is carried mostly by electrons, the induced electric field uB causes transverse electron motion (electron drift), which, being itself orthogonal to the magnetic field, induces an axial electric field, known as the Hall field, and an axial body force, F, given by... 

The k p method provides analytic descriptions on electronic states of CNT. It shows, for example, that the band gap of a semiconducting CNT is inversely proportional to the diameter because of a linear dispersion of the bands. It is suitable also for descriptions of the electronic motion in external perturbations such as electric and magnetic fields. 

The Born-Oppenheimer approximation is the first of several approximations used to simplify the solution of the Schradinger equation. It simplifies the general molecular problem by separating nuclear and electronic motions. This approximation is reasonable since the mass of a typical nucleus is thousands of times greater than that of an electron. The nuclei move very slowly with respect to the electrons, and the electrons react essentially instantaneously to changes in nuclear position. Thus, the electron distribution within a molecular system depends on the positions of the nuclei, and not on their velocities. Put another way, the nuclei look fixed to the electrons, and electronic motion can be described as occurring in a field of fixed nuclei. 

Imagine a model hydrogen molecule with non-interacting electrons, such that their Coulomb repulsion is zero. Each electron in our model still has kinetic energy and is still attracted to both nuclei, but the electron motions are completely independent of each other because the electron-electron interaction term is zero. We would, therefore, expect that the electronic wavefunction for the pair of electrons would be a product of the wavefunctions for two independent electrons in H2+ (Figure 4.1), which I will write X(rO and F(r2). Thus X(ri) and T(r2) are molecular orbitals which describe independently the two electrons in our non-interacting electron model. 

Assumption of a rigorous separation of nuclear and electronic motions (Bom-Oppenheimer approximation). In most cases this is a quite good approximation, and there is a good understanding of when it will fail. There are, however, very few general techniques for going beyond the Bom-Oppenheimer approximation. 

Quantum mechanics provides a mathematical framework that leads to expression (4). In addition, for the hydrogen atom it tells us a great deal about how the electron moves about the nucleus. It does not, however, tell us an exact path along which the electron moves. All that can be done is to predict the probability of finding an electron at a given point in space. This probability, considered over a period of time, gives an averaged picture of how an electron behaves. This description of the electron motion is what we have called an orbital. 

The correlation of electron motion in molecular systems is responsible for many important effects, but its theoretical treatment has proved to be very difficult. Thus many quantum valence calculations use wave functions which are adjusted to optimize kinetic energy effects and the potential energy of interaction of nuclei and electrons but which do not adequately allow for electron correlation and hence yield excessive electron repulsion energy. This problem may be subdivided into cases of overlapping and nonoverlapping electron distributions. Both are very important but we shall concern ourselves here with only the nonoverlapping case. 

The coupling of vibrational and electronic motions in degenerate electronic states of inorganic complexes, part 1 state of double degeneracy. A. D. Liehr, Prog. Inorg. Chem., 1962, 3, 281-314 (25). 

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