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Lecture

Hydrogen Molecule: Electronic Structure

In course

MICRO-530: Nanotechnology

This course gives the basics for understanding nanotechnology from an engineer's perspective: physical background, materials aspects and scaling laws, fabrication and imaging of nanoscale devices. ...

Description

This lecture explores the electronic structure of the hydrogen molecule, focusing on the Hamiltonian, LCAO method, wavefunctions, bonding, and molecular orbitals. It delves into the energy levels, bond distances, and the comparison with helium molecules. The presentation also covers the shape of molecular orbitals and the rules for strong bond formation.

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Instructors (2)

Jürgen Brugger

I am a Professor of Microengineering and co-affiliated to Materials Science. Before joining EPFL I was at the MESA Research Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and at the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, in Tokyo, Japan. I received a Master in Physical-Electronics and a PhD degree from Neuchâtel University, Switzerland. Research in my laboratory focuses on various aspects of MEMS and Nanotechnology. My group contributes to the field at the fundamental level as well as in technological development, as demonstrated by the start-ups that spun off from the lab. In our research, key competences are in micro/nanofabrication, additive micro-manufacturing, new materials for MEMS, increasingly for wearable and biomedical applications. Together with my students and colleagues we published over 200 peer-refereed papers and I had the pleasure to supervise over 25 PhD students. Former students and postdocs have been successful in receiving awards and starting their own scientific careers. I am honoured for the appointment in 2016 as Fellow of the IEEE “For contributions to micro and nano manufacturing technology”. In 2017 my lab was awarded an ERC AdvG in the field of advanced micro-manufacturing.

Giovanni Boero

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Chemistry

Computational chemistry: Topics in computational chemistry

Inorganic chemistry: Coordination chemistry

Related concepts (32)

Molecular orbital theory

In chemistry, molecular orbital theory (MO theory or MOT) is a method for describing the electronic structure of molecules using quantum mechanics. It was proposed early in the 20th century. In molecular orbital theory, electrons in a molecule are not assigned to individual chemical bonds between atoms, but are treated as moving under the influence of the atomic nuclei in the whole molecule. Quantum mechanics describes the spatial and energetic properties of electrons as molecular orbitals that surround two or more atoms in a molecule and contain valence electrons between atoms.

Linear combination of atomic orbitals

A linear combination of atomic orbitals or LCAO is a quantum superposition of atomic orbitals and a technique for calculating molecular orbitals in quantum chemistry. In quantum mechanics, electron configurations of atoms are described as wavefunctions. In a mathematical sense, these wave functions are the basis set of functions, the basis functions, which describe the electrons of a given atom. In chemical reactions, orbital wavefunctions are modified, i.e.

Molecular orbital

In chemistry, a molecular orbital (ɒrbədl) is a mathematical function describing the location and wave-like behavior of an electron in a molecule. This function can be used to calculate chemical and physical properties such as the probability of finding an electron in any specific region. The terms atomic orbital and molecular orbital were introduced by Robert S. Mulliken in 1932 to mean one-electron orbital wave functions. At an elementary level, they are used to describe the region of space in which a function has a significant amplitude.

Chemical structure

A chemical structure of a molecule is a spatial arrangement of its atoms and their chemical bonds. Its determination includes a chemist's specifying the molecular geometry and, when feasible and necessary, the electronic structure of the target molecule or other solid. Molecular geometry refers to the spatial arrangement of atoms in a molecule and the chemical bonds that hold the atoms together and can be represented using structural formulae and by molecular models; complete electronic structure descriptions include specifying the occupation of a molecule's molecular orbitals.

Antibonding molecular orbital

In theoretical chemistry, an antibonding orbital is a type of molecular orbital that weakens the chemical bond between two atoms and helps to raise the energy of the molecule relative to the separated atoms. Such an orbital has one or more nodes in the bonding region between the nuclei. The density of the electrons in the orbital is concentrated outside the bonding region and acts to pull one nucleus away from the other and tends to cause mutual repulsion between the two atoms.

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