The physics of ionic structures

The existence of many ionic structures in MCVB wave functions has often been criticized by some workers as being unphysical. This has been the case particularly when a covalent bond between like atoms is being represented. Nevertheless, we have seen in Chapter 2 that ionic structures contribute to electron delocalization in the H2 molecule and would be expected to do likewise in all cases. Later in this chapter we will see that they can also be interpreted as contributions from ionic states of the constituent atoms. When the bond is between unlike atoms, it is to be expected that ionic stmctures in the wave function will also contribute to various electric moments, the dipole moment being the simplest. The amounts of these ionic structures in the wave functions will be determined by a sort of balancing act in the variation principle between the diagonal effects of the ionic state energies and the off-diagonal effect of the delocalization. 

In this chapter we will also focus on the dipole moment of molecules. With these, some of the most interesting phenomena are the molecules for which the electric moment is in the wrong direction insofar as the atomic electronegativities are concerned. CO is probably the most famous of these cases, but other molecules have even more striking disagreements. One of the larger is the simple diatomic BF. We will take up the question of the dipole moments of molecules like BF in Chapter 12. In this chapter we will examine in a more general way how various sorts of structures influence electric moments for two simple cases. For some of the discussion in this chapter we restrict ourselves to descriptions of minimal basis set results, since these satisfactorily describe the physics of the effects. In other cases a more extensive treatment is necessary. 

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