Hiickel molecular-orbital method with overlap

In order to perform calculations on larger molecules in a reasonable amount of time, approximations are made, which may involve the neglect of certain terms, or the inclusion of experimentally determined parameters. The best known and simplest example of this level of approximation are Hiickel Molecular Orbital (HMO) calculations, which treat only pi-electrons, in conjugated hydrocarbons, with neglect of overlap (1). While obviously limited in use, HMO methods are still used in certain research applications. 

In this method, the orbital symmetry rules are related to the Hiickel aromaticity rule discussed in Chapter 2. Huckel s mle, which states that a cyclic system of electrons is aromatic (hence, stable) when it consists of 4n + 2 electrons, applies of course to molecules in their ground states. In applying the orbital symmetry principle, we are not concerned with ground states, but with transition states. In the present method, we do not examine the molecular orbitals themselves but rather the p orbitals before they overlap to form the MO. Such a set of p orbitals is called a basis set (Fig. 15.5). In investigating the possibility of a concerted reaction, we put the basis sets into the position they would occupy in the transition state. Figure 15.6 shows this for both the... 

H was the matrix-component of the Hiickel effective-Hamiltonian operator, effective between two basis atomic-orbitals, 4>r and 4>s, Srs was the overlap integral between 4>r and s, and H was set equal to a, H to / . This is how we developed the simple HMO-approach in Chapter Two. What Roothaan did was to show that a formally similar determinant is obtained in a full treatment of the re-electrons, but that it involves a somewhat more complicated expression for the matrix-elements, H . Furthermore, he showed that this more-complicated expression somehow had to take into account interactions between any one re-electron and all the other re-electrons. We do not go into the details of this here, except to say that, in order to find the LCAO-MO coefficients for one molecular orbital, it is necessary to know all the others, because all the others appear in the expressions for the equivalent terms, Hrs. This is a very familiar situation which mathematicians have long known how to deal with and which we encountered during our discussion of the self-consistent" Huckel-methods in 7.2—7.5 it is necessary to use an iterative scheme. An initial guess is made of all the orbitals except one and these are used to calculate the H -terms for the one orbital which has not yet... 

It is shown that the LCAO molecular Hartree-Fock equations for a closed-shell configuration can be reduced to a form identical with that of the Hoffmann extended Hiickel approximation if (i) we accept the Mulliken approximation for overlap charge distributions and (ii) we assume a uniform charge distribution in calculating two-electron integrals over molecular orbitals. Numerical comparisons indicate that this approximation leads to results which, while unsuitable for high accuracy calculations, should be reasonably satisfactory for molecules that cannot at present be handled with facility by standard LCAO molecular Hartree-Fock methods. 

Molecular-orbital theory has taken many forms and has been dealt with by many approximations. In 1963 Hoffmann S presented a formalism which he referred to as extended Hiickel (EH). In the 1930 s, however, this formalism would simply have been called molecular-orbital, since it is a straightforward application of molecular-orbital (MO) theory, using a one-electron Hamiltonian. Hoffmann referred to it as extended Hiickel because it did not limit itself to 7r-electron systems and was able to deal with saturated molecules by including all overlap integrals. In these respects it did extend the usual, or simple Huckel, method, which was customarily applied to 7T-electrons, and assumed complete tt — a separability. 

The Hiickel method is a simple semi-empirical method for determining approximate LCAO molecular orbitals to represent delocalized bonding in planar molecules. It treats only pi electrons and assumes that the framework of sigma bonds has been treated separately. As an example we consider the allyl radical, CH2 = CH - CH2.. If the plane of the molecule is the xy plane, each carbon atom has an unhybridized 2pz orbital that is not involved in the sigma bonds, which are made from the Isp hybrids in the xy plane with the appropriate rotation of the coordinate system at each atom to provide maximum overlap. We construct linear combinations from the three orbitals, as in Eq. (21.6-2). 

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