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Simplify your life

Nature Physics volume 16, page 1242 (2020)Cite this article

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Within the Hartree atomic unit systems, the Schrödinger equation becomes parameter free. But there’s more to it than making a student’s life easier, as Gordon Drake and Eite Tiesinga recount.

In the earliest days of quantum mechanics, these same problems must have plagued Douglas Hartree (pictured) as he struggled with the complexities of solving the Schrödinger equation for many-electron atoms and molecules. This brought Hartree face to face with the many-body problem in quantum mechanics. Just as in the classical equivalent, the equations of motion for an atom with two or more electrons cannot be solved exactly, and so approximations must be used. Hartree’s idea was to assume that each electron moves in the average field produced by all the others. The resulting equations are now known as the Hartree equations, and, if the indistinguishability of the electrons is taken into account, the Hartree–Fock equations after the Russian physicist Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock. Today, these equations and their extensions are widely used throughout the atomic physics and quantum chemistry communities to predict properties of atoms and molecules.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada

    Gordon W. F. Drake

  2. Joint Quantum Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

    Eite Tiesinga

Authors
  1. Gordon W. F. Drake
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  2. Eite Tiesinga
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gordon W. F. Drake or Eite Tiesinga.

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Drake, G.W.F., Tiesinga, E. Simplify your life. Nat. Phys. 16, 1242 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-01095-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-01095-x

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