Hamiltonian many-electron+nucleus

Now consider a d ion as an example of a so-called many-electron atom. Here, each electron possesses kinetic energy, is attracted to the (shielded) nucleus and is repelled by the other electron. We write the Hamiltonian operator for this as follows ... 

Unfortunately, the Schrodinger equation for multi-electron atoms and, for that matter, all molecules cannot be solved exactly and does not lead to an analogous expression to Equation 4.5 for the quantised energy levels. Even for simple atoms such as sodium the number of interactions between the particles increases rapidly. Sodium contains 11 electrons and so the correct quantum mechanical description of the atom has to include 11 nucleus-electron interactions, 55 electron-electron repulsion interactions and the correct description of the kinetic energy of the nucleus and the electrons - a further 12 terms in the Hamiltonian. The analysis of many-electron atomic spectra is complicated and beyond the scope of this book, but it was one such analysis performed by Sir Norman Lockyer that led to the discovery of helium on the Sun before it was discovered on the Earth. 

Quantum numbers and shapes of atomic orbitals Let us denote the one-electron hydrogenic Hamiltonian operator by h, to distinguish it from the many-electron H used elsewhere in this book. This operator contains terms to represent the electronic kinetic energy ( e) and potential energy of attraction to the nucleus (vne),... 

Analytic, exact solutions cannot be obtained except for the simplest systems, i.e. hydrogen-like atoms with just one electron and one nucleus. Good approximate solutions can be found by means of the self-consistent field (SCF) method, the details of which need not concern us. If all the electrons have been explicitly considered in the Hamiltonian, the wave functions V, will be many-electron functions V, will contain the coordinates of all the electrons, and a complete electron density map can be obtained by plotting Vf. The associated energies E, are the energy states of the molecule (see Section 2.6) the lowest will be the ground state , and the calculated energy differences En — El should match the spectroscopic transitions in the electronic spectrum. 

We have already dealt with the calculation of the wave functions of the hydrogen atom. We now proceed to consider many-electron atoms, first dealing with the simplest such example, the helium atom which possesses two electrons. The Hamiltonian for a helium-like atom with an infinitely heavy nucleus can be obtained by selecting the appropriate terms from the master equation in chapter 3. The Hamiltonian we use is... 

Second, the Hamiltonian operator for a relativistic many-body system does not have the simple, well-known form of that for the non-relativistic formulation, i.e. a sum of a sum of one-electron operators, describing the electronic kinetic energy and the electron-nucleus interactions, and a sum of two-electron terms associated with the Coulomb repulsion between the electrons. The relativistic many-electron Hamiltonian cannot be written in closed form it may be derived perturbatively from quantum electrodynamics.46... 

R and r denote nuclear and electronic coordinates, respectively, and Zn is the charge on nucleus N. JCei is the usual electronic Hamiltonian for fixed positions of the nuclei, ei (r R) is the many-electron ground state electronic wave function that depends parametrically on the nuclear positions, R, and and represent sums over electrons and / ... 

The reduced-mass and mass-polarization terms arise on transforming the many-electron plus nucleus Hamiltonian to center of mass coordinates. 

The spin-orbit Hamiltonian of Eq. (31) is correct only for a bare nucleus. In the case of many-electron atoms where the nucleus is surrounded by a "core of electrons, the electrostatic potential, U (r), changes more rapidly with r because of the rapid change in shielding by the core as we... 

For a given electronic Hamiltonian (that is, a proper description of the electron-nucleus and electron-electron interactions), the LCAO ansatz may deliver the molecular orbitals ipi and the many-electron wave function Y provided that there is a set of useful basis functions (p, for example, atomic orbitals. At this point, it is probably the right time to review briefly what type of atomic orbitals are mostly used within molecular quantum chemistry. By... 

In constructing the hamiltonian operator for a many electron atom, we shall assume a fixed nucleus and ignore the minor error introduced by using electron mass rather than reduced mass. There will be a kinetic energy operator for each electron and potential terms for the various electrostatic attractions and repulsions in the system. Assuming n electrons and an atomic number of Z, the hamiltonian operator is (in atomic units)... 

Since the open-shell term in P does not possess spherical symmetry, the effective Hamiltonian will contain a non-spherical potential and as a result, even with initial orbitals of true central-field form (i.e. with spherical-harmonic angle dependence), the first cycle of an SCF iteration will destroy the symmetry properties of the orbitals—the solutions that give an improved energy will not be of pure s and p type but will be mixtures. This is a second example of a symmetry-breaking situation, akin to the spin polarization encountered in the UHF method. The resultant many-electron wavefunction will also lose the symmetry characteristic of a true spectroscopic state there will be a spatial polarization of the Is 2s core and the predicted ground state will no longer be of pure P type, just as in the UHF calculation there will be a spin polarization and the exact spin multiplicity of the many-electron state will be lost. Of course, the many-electron Hamiltonian does possess spherical symmetry (i.e. invariance under rotations around the nucleus), and the reason for the symmetry breaking lies at the level of the one-electron (i.e. IPM-type) model—the effective field in the 1-electron Hamiltonian is a fiction rather than a reality. 

Here we simply put on record the results obtained (see e.g. Moss, 1973) for a many-electron molecule in the fixed-nucleus approximation. The Hamiltonian will be written (cf. (1.1.13)) in the form... 

In order to improve the theoretical description of a many-body system one has to take into consideration the so-called correlation effects, i.e. to deal with the problem of accounting for the departures from the simple independent particle model, in which the electrons are assumed to move independently of each other in an average field due to the atomic nucleus and the other electrons. Making an additional assumption that this average potential is spherically symmetric we arrive at the central field concept (Hartree-Fock model), which forms the basis of the atomic shell structure and the chemical regularity of the elements. Of course, relativistic effects must also be accounted for as corrections, if they are small, or already at the very beginning starting with the relativistic Hamiltonian and relativistic wave functions. 

The electronic term which is the first term in the Hamiltonian written in Eq. (3.13) and used to derive the Solomon and Bloembergen equations (Eqs. (3.16), (3.17), (3.19), (3.20), (3.26), (3.27)) may be inappropriate in many cases, since the electron energy levels may be strongly affected by the presence of ZFS or hyperfine coupling with the metal nucleus. Therefore, the electron static Hamiltonian to be solved to find the cos values, i.e. all electron energy transitions, and their probabilities, will be, in general,... 

We shall use the principle of stationary action to obtain a variational definition of the force acting on an atom in a molecule. This derivation will illustrate the important point that the definition of an atomic property follows directly from the atomic statement of stationary action. To obtain Ehrenfest s second relationship as given in eqn (5.24) for the general time-dependent case, the operator G in eqn (6.3) and hence in eqn (6.2) is set equal to pi, the momentum operator of the electron whose coordinates are integrated over the basin of the subsystem 1. The Hamiltonian in the commutator is taken to be the many-electroii, fixed-nucleus Hamiltonian... 

The mathematical problem associated with the Dirac Hamiltonian, i.e. the starting point of the relativistic theory of atoms, can be phrased in simple terms. The electron-positron field can have states of arbitrarily negative energy. As a general feature of the Dirac spectrum this instability occurs even in the case of extended nuclei and even in the absence of any nucleus (free Dirac spectrum), the energy is not bounded from below. This gives rise to the necessity of renormalization and well-established renormalization schemes have been around for many decades. Despite their successful applications in physics, we may ask instead whether there exist states that allow for positivity of the energy. 

---