Molecular orbital methods LCAO approximation

The 5-position of the nonprotonated 1,2,4-thiadiazole system was calculated to be the most reactive in nucleophilic substitution reactions using a simple molecular orbital method with LCAO approximation (84CHEC-I(6)463>. 

This is the classical and general LCAO approximation (linear combination of atomic orbitals) of the molecular orbital method. 

The question now arises, why does the molecular orbital method afford four possibilities, three with spins paired, whereas the atomic orbital method seemed to yield only two possibilities, one with spins paired The answer comes from looking at a way of approximating ag and wave functions on the two atoms, which you used before. This way of approximating molecular orbitals is often called the LCAO approximation the linear combination of atomic orbitals. Fig. 6.8 shows cross-sections of A and 5. Clearly A + B looks like og (Fig. 6.7) and A — B looks like <7U. By using these approximations, the four functions of Table 6.1 can be rewritten into the forms shown in Table 6.2. When the products in Table 6.2 are expanded, and the results are compared with (6.1), the four functions take the forms shown in Table 6.3. 

In subsequent independent papers, Pauling [4] and Slater [6] generalized the valence-bond treatment made for the H2 molecule to polyatomic systems as H2O, NH3, CH4 etc. .. where an atom of the first period (the second row) is linked to hydrogens by several two-electron bonds they described the valence orbitals coming from the central atom by appropriate s and p combinations known later as hybrid orbitals. At the same time Hund [7] and Mulliken [8] presented another quantum theory of valence, the molecular orbital method in LCAO form, using the spectroscopic concept of molecular configuration built from s, p, d. ..pure atomic orbitals. The actual status of the hybridization process was clarified by Van Vleck [9], who showed that the various approximations... 

In general, semiempirical methods use molecular orbitals composed of linear combination of atomic orbitals (the LCAO approximation). 

In the case of ethylene the a framework is formed by the carbon sp -orbitals and the rr-bond is formed by the sideways overlap of the remaining two p-orbitals. The two 7r-orbitals have the same symmetry as the ir 2p and 7T 2p orbitals of a homonuclear diatomic molecule (Fig. 1.6), and the sequence of energy levels of these two orbitals is the same (Fig. 1.7). We need to know how such information may be deduced for ethylene and larger conjugated hydrocarbons. In most cases the information required does not provide a searching test of a molecular orbital approximation. Indeed for 7r-orbitals the information can usually be provided by the simple Huckel (1931) molecular orbital method (HMO) which uses the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO), or even by the free electron model (FEM). These methods and the results they give are outlined in the remainder of this chapter. 

The quantum mechanics methods in HyperChem differ in how they approximate the Schrodinger equation and how they compute potential energy. The ab initio method expands molecular orbitals into a linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) and does not introduce any further approximation. 

HyperChem uses the Linear Combination of Atomic Orbitals-Molecular Orbital (LCAO-MO) approximation for all ofitsnl) initio semi-empirical methods. If /j represents a molecular orbital and... 

The coefficients indicate the contribution of each atomic orbital to the molecular orbital. This method of representing the molecular orbital wave function in terms of combinations of atomic orbital wave functions is known as the linear combination of atomic orbitals approximation (LCAO). The combination of atomic orbitals chosen is called the basis set. 

The VB and the MO methods are rooted in very different philosophies of describing molecules. Although at the outset each method leads to different approximate wave functions, when successive improvements are made the two ultimately converge to the same wave function. In both the VB and MO methods, an approximate molecular wave function is obtained by combining appropriate hydrogen-like orbitals on each of the atoms in the molecule. This is called the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) approximation. 

When the Hartree-Fock method is applied to molecules, molecular orbitals are used instead of atomic orbitals. To construct the molecular orbitals, one widely used approximation is LCAO (linear combinations of atomic orbitals). According to molecular orbital theory, the total wave function of the system is written as a combination of molecular orbitals, spin functions describing electrons in terms of spin j(a) or — j p). 

Despite the obvious limitation of the LCAO procedure as revealed by the Hj and H2 problems it still is the most popular scheme used in the theoretical study of polyatomic molecules. There is a bewildering number of approximate methods, commonly distinguished in terms of cryptic acronyms, designated as either ab initio or semi-empirical, but all of them based on the LCAO construction of molecular orbitals. The precise details can be found in many books and reviews. The present summary uses the discussion of Richards and Cooper [92] as a guide. 

Several valence-bond (VB) treatments of heterocyclic compounds were reported in the thirties and forties.1, 2 The known difficulty in applying the VB method to complicated molecules has made an overwhelming majority of authors use the molecular orbital (MO) method. In most cases its simplest version, the naive MO LCAO method, has been used. This approximation differs from the well-known Hiickel... 

Of the various methods of approximating the correct molecular orbitals, we shall discuss only one- the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method. We assume that we can approximate the correct molecular orbitals by combining the atomic orbitals of the atoms that form the molecule. The rationale is that most of the time the electrons will be nearer and hence controlled by oneor the other of the two nuclei, and when this is so, the molecular orbital should be very nearly the same as the atomic orbital for that atom. The basic process is the same as the one wc employed in constructing hybrid atomic orbitals except that now we are combining orbitals on different atoms to form new orbitals that are associated with the entire molecule. We... 

Sometimes the estimation of the electronic structures of polymer chains necessitates the inclusion of long-range interactions and intermolecular interactions in the chemical shift calculations. To do so, it is necessary to use a sophisticated theoretical method which can take account of the characteristics of polymers. In this context, the tight-binding molecular orbital(TB MO) theory from the field of solid state physics is used, in the same sense in which it is employed in the LCAO approximation in molecular quantum chemistry to describe the electronic structures of infinite polymers with a periodical structure -11,36). In a polymer chain with linearly bonded monomer units, the potential energy if an electron varies periodically along the chain. In such a system, the wave function vj/ (k) for electrons at a position r can be obtained from Bloch s theorem as follows(36,37) ... 

A crystalline solid can be considered as a huge, single molecule subsequently, the electronic wave functions of this giant molecule can be constructed with the help of the molecular orbital (MO) methodology [19]. That is, the electrons are introduced into crystal orbitals, which are extended along the entire crystal, where each crystal orbital can accommodate two electrons with opposite spins. A good approximation for the construction of a crystal MO is the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method, where the MOs are constructed as a LCAO of the atoms composing the crystal [19]. 

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