Hydrogen atom momentum wave functions

Humberston and Wallace, 1972), is shown in Figure 6.4. Also shown there is the distribution function obtained using the Born approximation, in which neither the positron nor the atomic wave function is modified by the interaction. This latter curve therefore represents the momentum distribution of the electron in the undistorted hydrogen atom. The distribution function for the accurate wave function is narrower than that for the undistorted case because the positron attracts the electron towards itself and away from the nucleus, thereby enhancing the probability of low values of the momentum of the pair. 

On application of this equation it is found that the momentum wave functions for the harmonic oscillator have the same form (Hermite orthogonal functions) as the coordinate wave functions (Prob. 64-1), whereas those for the hydrogen atom afe quite different.1... 

Problem 64-2. Evaluate the momentum wave function for the normal hydrogen atom,... 

The momentum wave functions in various atomic models are calculated for arbitrary atomic orbitals. The nonrelativistic hydrogenic, the Hartree-Fock, the relativistic hydrogenic, and the Dirac-Fock models are considered. The momentum wave functions are obtained as a Fourier transform of the wave function in the position space. The Hartree-Fock and the Dirac-Fock wave functions in atoms are given in terms of Slater-type orbitals (STO s), i.e. the Hartree-Fock-Roothaan (HFR) method and the relativistic HFR (RHFR) method. All the wave functions in the momentum space can be expressed analytically in terms of hypergeometric functions. 

Figure 1. The electron momentum density for atomic hydrogen measured by EMS for the indicated energies compared with the square of Schrodinger wave function (solid curve) [4].

The relationship between alternative separable solutions of the Coulomb problem in momentum space is exploited in order to obtain hydrogenic orbitals which are of interest for Sturmian expansions of use in atomic and molecular structure calculations and for the description of atoms in fields. In view of their usefulness in problems where a direction in space is privileged, as when atoms are in an electric or magnetic field, we refer to these sets as to the Stark and Zeeman bases, as an alternative to the usual spherical basis, set. Fock s projection onto the surface of a sphere in the four dimensional hyperspace allows us to establish the connections of the momentum space wave functions with hyperspherical harmonics. Its generalization to higher spaces permits to build up multielectronic and multicenter orbitals. 

The quantum mechanical model proposed in 1926 by Erwin Schrodinger describes an atom by a mathematical equation similar to that used to describe wave motion. The behavior of each electron in an atom is characterized by a wave function, or orbital, the square of which defines the probability of finding the electron in a given volume of space. Each wave function has a set of three variables, called quantum numbers. The principal quantum number n defines the size of the orbital the angular-momentum quantum number l defines the shape of the orbital and the magnetic quantum number mj defines the spatial orientation of the orbital. In a hydrogen atom, which contains only one electron, the... 

Fig. 3.1. The probability of finding an electron with absolute momentum p in a hydrogen atom, observed by measuring the complete kinematics of ionisation events at the total energies shown (Lohmann and Weigold, 1981). The curve shows the square of the momentum-space wave function.

It turns out that there is not one specific solution to the Schrodinger equation but many. This is good news because the electron in a hydrogen atom can indeed have a number of different energies. It turns out that each wave function can be defined by three quantum numbers (there is also a fourth quantum number but this is not needed to define the wave function). We have already met the principal quantum number, n. The other two are called the orbital angular momentum quantum number (sometimes called the azimuthal quantum number), , and the magnetic quantum number, mi. 

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