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arXiv:1408.0099 · International Journal of Quantum Information

Chemical bond and entanglement of electrons in the hydrogen molecule

Nikos Iliopoulos, Andreas Terzis

Published Aug 1, 2014• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the quantum correlations (in terms of concurrence of indistinguishable electrons) in a prototype molecular system (hydrogen molecule). With the assistance of the standard approximations of the linear combination of atomic orbitals and the configuration interaction methods we describe the electronic wavefunction of the ground state of the H 2 molecule. Moreover, we managed to find a rather simple analytic expression for the concurrence (the most used measure of quantum entanglement) of the two electrons when the molecule is in its lowest energy. We have found that concurrence does not really show any relation to the construction of the chemical bond.

DOI
10.1142/s0219749914500282

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We use the concept of quantum entanglement to give a physical meaning to the electron correlation energy in systems of interacting electrons. The electron correlation is not directly observable, being defined as the difference between the exact ground state energy of the many-electron Schr ̈odinger equation and the Hartree–Fock energy. Using the configuration interaction method for the hydrogen molecule, we calculate the correlation energy and compare it with the entanglement as a function of the nucleus– nucleus separation. In the same spirit, we analyze a dimer of ethylene, which represents the simplest organic conjugate system, changing the relative orientation and distance of the molecules to obtain the configuration corresponding to maximum entanglement.
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The chemical bond is an important local concept to understand chemical compounds and processes. Unfortunately, like most local concepts, the chemical bond and the bond order do not correspond to any physical observable and thus cannot be determined as an expectation value of a quantum chemical operator. We recently demonstrated [Boguslawski et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput., 2013, 9, 2959-2973] that one- and two-orbital-based entanglement measures can be applied to interpret electronic wave functions in terms of orbital correlation. Orbital entanglement emerged as a powerful tool to provide a qualitative understanding of bond-forming and bond-breaking processes, and allowed for an estimation of bond orders of simple diatomic molecules beyond the classical bonding models. In this article we demonstrate that the orbital entanglement analysis can be extended to polyatomic molecules to understand chemical bonding.
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