Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 10, 2026

Spatial Separation of Molecular Conformers and Clusters
Published on: January 9, 2014
Kinetic energy partition method applied to ground state helium-like atoms
1Institute of Applied Mechanics, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan.
Abstract:
We have used the recently developed kinetic energy partition (KEP) method to solve the quantum eigenvalue problems for helium-like atoms and obtain precise ground state energies and wave-functions. The key to treating properly the electron-electron (repulsive) Coulomb potential energies for the KEP method to be applied is to introduce a "negative mass" term into the partitioned kinetic energy. A Hartree-like product wave-function from the subsystem wave-functions is used to form the initial trial function, and the variational search for the optimized adiabatic parameters leads to a precise ground state energy. This new approach sheds new light on the all-important problem of solving many-electron Schrödinger equations and hopefully opens a new way to predictive quantum chemistry. The results presented here give very promising evidence that an effective one-electron model can be used to represent a many-electron system, in the spirit of density functional theory.
Related Concept Videos
Basic Postulates of Kinetic Molecular Theory: Particle Size, Energy, and Collision
The Bohr Model
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Spin State Population Distribution
Molecular Kinetic Energy
Kinetic Energy for a Rigid Body
The Molecular Nature of Internal Energy

