Quantum mechanical number

Kramer, P.. Saraceno, M. Geometry of the Time-Dependent Variatonal Principle in Quantum Mechanics. Number 140 in Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1981)... 

Since it is not possible to generate antisynnnetric combinations of products if the same spin orbital appears twice in each tenn, it follows that states which assign the same set of four quantum numbers twice cannot possibly satisfy the requirement P.j i = -ij/, so this statement of the exclusion principle is consistent with the more general symmetry requirement. An even more general statement of the exclusion principle, which can be regarded as an additional postulate of quantum mechanics, is... 

Electrons, protons and neutrons and all other particles that have s = are known as fennions. Other particles are restricted to s = 0 or 1 and are known as bosons. There are thus profound differences in the quantum-mechanical properties of fennions and bosons, which have important implications in fields ranging from statistical mechanics to spectroscopic selection mles. It can be shown that the spin quantum number S associated with an even number of fennions must be integral, while that for an odd number of them must be half-integral. The resulting composite particles behave collectively like bosons and fennions, respectively, so the wavefunction synnnetry properties associated with bosons can be relevant in chemical physics. One prominent example is the treatment of nuclei, which are typically considered as composite particles rather than interacting protons and neutrons. Nuclei with even atomic number tlierefore behave like individual bosons and those with odd atomic number as fennions, a distinction that plays an important role in rotational spectroscopy of polyatomic molecules. 

Time-dependent quantum mechanical calcnlations have also been perfomied to study the HCO resonance states [90,91]. The resonance energies, linewidths and quantum number assigmnents detemiined from these calcnlations are in excellent agreement with the experimental results. 

For larger systems, various approximate schemes have been developed, called mixed methods as they treat parts of the system using different levels of theory. Of interest to us here are quantuin-seiniclassical methods, which use full quantum mechanics to treat the electrons, but use approximations based on trajectories in a classical phase space to describe the nuclear motion. The prefix quantum may be dropped, and we will talk of seiniclassical methods. There are a number of different approaches, but here we shall concentrate on the few that are suitable for direct dynamics molecular simulations. An overview of other methods is given in the introduction of [21]. 

A number of procedures have been proposed to map a wave function onto a function that has the form of a phase-space distribution. Of these, the oldest and best known is the Wigner function [137,138]. (See [139] for an exposition using Louiville space.) For a review of this, and other distributions, see [140]. The quantum mechanical density matrix is a matrix representation of the density operator... 

While simulations reach into larger time spans, the inaccuracies of force fields become more apparent on the one hand properties based on free energies, which were never used for parametrization, are computed more accurately and discrepancies show up on the other hand longer simulations, particularly of proteins, show more subtle discrepancies that only appear after nanoseconds. Thus force fields are under constant revision as far as their parameters are concerned, and this process will continue. Unfortunately the form of the potentials is hardly considered and the refinement leads to an increasing number of distinct atom types with a proliferating number of parameters and a severe detoriation of transferability. The increased use of quantum mechanics to derive potentials will not really improve this situation ab initio quantum mechanics is not reliable enough on the level of kT, and on-the-fly use of quantum methods to derive forces, as in the Car-Parrinello method, is not likely to be applicable to very large systems in the foreseeable future. 

The problem with most quantum mechanical methods is that they scale badly. This means that, for instance, a calculation for twice as large a molecule does not require twice as much computer time and resources (this would be linear scaling), but rather 2" times as much, where n varies between about 3 for DFT calculations to 4 for Hartree-Fock and very large numbers for ab-initio techniques with explicit treatment of electron correlation. Thus, the size of the molecules that we can treat with conventional methods is limited. Linear scaling methods have been developed for ab-initio, DFT and semi-empirical methods, but only the latter are currently able to treat complete enzymes. There are two different approaches available. 

Breindl et. al. published a model based on semi-empirical quantum mechanical descriptors and back-propagation neural networks [14]. The training data set consisted of 1085 compounds, and 36 descriptors were derived from AMI and PM3 calculations describing electronic and spatial effects. The best results with a standard deviation of 0.41 were obtained with the AMl-based descriptors and a net architecture 16-25-1, corresponding to 451 adjustable parameters and a ratio of 2.17 to the number of input data. For a test data set a standard deviation of 0.53 was reported, which is quite close to the training model. 

It is always possible to convert internal to Cartesian coordinates and vice versa. However, one coordinate system is usually preferred for a given application. Internal coordinates can usefully describe the relationship between the atoms in a single molecule, but Cartesian coordinates may be more appropriate when describing a collection of discrete molecules. Internal coordinates are commonly used as input to quantum mechanics programs, whereas calculations using molecular mechanics are usually done in Cartesian coordinates. The total number of coordinates that must be specified in the internal coordinate system is six fewer... 

Quantum mechanics is primarily concerned with atomic particles electrons, protons and neutrons. When the properties of such particles (e.g. mass, charge, etc.) are expressed in macroscopic units then the value must usually be multiplied or divided by several powers of 10. It is preferable to use a set of units that enables the results of a calculation to he reported as easily manageable values. One way to achieve this would be to multiply eacli number by an appropriate power of 10. However, further simplification can be achieved by recognising that it is often necessary to carry quantities such as the mass of the electron or electronic charge all the way through a calculation. These quantities are thus also incorporated into the atomic units. The atomic units of length, mass and energy are as follows ... 

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