Molecular orbitals. LCAO method

Molecules. The electronic configurations of molecules can be built up by direct addition of atomic orbitals (LCAO method) or by considering molecular orbitals which occupy all of the space around the atoms of the molecule (molecular orbital method). 

The molecular orbital approach to chemical bonding rests on the notion that as elec trons m atoms occupy atomic orbitals electrons m molecules occupy molecular orbitals Just as our first task m writing the electron configuration of an atom is to identify the atomic orbitals that are available to it so too must we first describe the orbitals avail able to a molecule In the molecular orbital method this is done by representing molec ular orbitals as combinations of atomic orbitals the linear combination of atomic orbitals molecular orbital (LCAO MO) method... 

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 molecular orbitals used in these calculations are generated using the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method, in which an orbital is... 

Various theoretical methods and approaches have been used to model properties and reactivities of metalloporphyrins. They range from the early use of qualitative molecular orbital diagrams (24,25), linear combination of atomic orbitals to yield molecular orbitals (LCAO-MO) calculations (26-30), molecular mechanics (31,32) and semi-empirical methods (33-35), and self-consistent field method (SCF) calculations (36-43) to the methods commonly used nowadays (molecular dynamic simulations (31,44,45), density functional theory (DFT) (35,46-49), Moller-Plesset perturbation theory ( ) (50-53), configuration interaction (Cl) (35,42,54-56), coupled cluster (CC) (57,58), and CASSCF/CASPT2 (59-63)). 

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... 

Over the past 20 years and, in particular since 1955, many theoretical studies of the electronic structure of pyrrole using the molecular orbital approach with varying degrees of refinement have been reported. The 7r-electronic structure of pyrrole has been extensively discussed in terms of both the simple Hiickel molecular orbital (LCAO) theory37- 41-55-65 and the more sophisticated self-consistent field molecular orbital method (SCFMO method).18- 66-77 Extended... 

For explanation of experimental results and for correlation of charge densities with NMR data, semiempirical quantum-chemical calculations of benzo[c]pyrylium cation have been employed. Interestingly, the first calculation of 1,3-dimethyl-benzo[r]pyrylium cation by the simple linear combination of atomic orbitals/molecular orbital (LCAO/MO) method (70KGS1308) revealed a preference for the resonance from a in which the value of the charge density at C was three times as much as at C3. 

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]. 

As was emphasized before (cf. Chapter 3), a molecule is not simply a collection of its constituting atoms. Rather, it is a system of atomic nuclei and a common electron distribution. Nevertheless, in describing the electronic structure of a molecule, the most convenient way is to approximate the molecular electron distribution by the sum of atomic electron distributions. This approach is called the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method. The orbitals produced by the LCAO procedure are called molecular orbitals (MOs). An important common property of the atomic and molecular orbitals is that both are one-electron wave functions. Combining a certain number of one-electron atomic orbitals yields the same number of one-electron molecular orbitals. Finally, the total molecular wave function is the... 

The electron shell of molecules is constructed by linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO method) of the participating atoms to form bonding ct and n molecular orbitals (MOs), non-bonding n (lone pairs of electrons) and anti-bonding... 

Molecular orbital theory originated from the theoretical work of German physicist Friederich Hund (1896-1997) and its apphcation to the interpretation of the spectra of diatomic molecules by American physical chemist Robert S. MuUiken (1896-1986) (Hund, 1926, 1927a, b Mulliken, 1926, 1928a, b, 1932). Inspired by the success of Heitler and London s approach, Finklestein and Horowitz introduced the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method for approximating the MOs (Finkelstein and Horowitz, 1928). The British physicist John Edward Lennard-Jones (1894-1954) later suggested that only valence electrons need be treated as delocalized inner electrons could be considered as remaining in atomic orbitals (Lennard-Jones, 1929). 

It is well known that one of the standard approaches to Eq. (2.1) is the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method it consists in expanding the states of the solid in linear combination of atomic (or molecular) orbitals of the composing atoms (or molecules). This method, when not applied in oversimplified form, provides an accurate description of core and valence bands in any type of crystal (metals, semiconductors, and insulators). Applied with some caution, the method also provides precious information on lowest lying conduction States, replacing whenever necessary atomic orbitals with appropriate localized orbitals. ... 

This highly successful qualitative model parallels the most convenient quantum mechanical approach to molecular orbitals the method of linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO). We have assumed that the shapes and dispositions of bond orbitals are related, in a simple way to the shapes and dispositions of atomic orbitals. The LCAO method makes the same assumption mathematically to... 

Normally these molecular orbitals are obtained as expansions in a set of atom-centred basis functions (the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method), m being the number of such functions. Recently, two-dimensional numerical integration methods have been developed to solve the MCSCF equations for linear molecules. The dimension m is then, in principle, infinite (practice, it is determined by the size of the grid used in the numerical integration). The molecular-orbital space is further divided into three subspaces the inactive, the active and the external orbitals. The inactive and active subspaces constitute the internal (occupied) orbital subspace, while the external orbitals are unoccupied. The CASSCF wavefunction is formed as a linear combination of configuration state functions (CSFs) generated from these orbitals in the following way. 

The hydrogen molecule H2 is the simplest molecule which forms an electron-pair bond. Many calculations have been made for this molecule, which is a prototype for many other chemical bonds. One of the two basic quantum-mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecule involves constructing a molecular orbital for the bond from a linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO method). The other involves constructing the molecular orbital as the product of wave functions for each of the two electrons forming the bond. Both of these methods will be outlined. 

---