Computational Methods for f-Elements


Computational Methods for f-Elements

Patzschke, M.

Theoretical chemistry is a comparatively new research area in chemistry. In the last 100 years enormous progress has been made in understanding the electronic structures of molecules. Almost every publication nowadays has a theory section. This means, that all chemists have to understand the basics of quantum chemistry.

The f-elements, and especially the actinides are very challenging to work with in the laboratory, to make matters worse, they are even very challenging to treat computationally. The reason for this is threefold:


1) Each actinide atom adds a lot of electrons to the system and as computational methods get much more time consuming when the amount of electrons in the system is increased, special care has to be taken to make the computations as efficient as possible.
2) Actinides, especially the later ones in low oxidation states contain many unpaired electrons, making many of the actinide-containing species multi-reference cases, where simple computational methods do not work.
3) For heavy elements, the expectation value of the speed of the innermost electrons approaches the speed of light. This means, normal quantum-chemical methods as used for light elements will not work.

In the light of the above mentioned points we will have a look at the methods available in the quantum chemical treatment of f-elements. We will spend some time looking at density-functional theory, the work-horse of computational chemistry. Special care will be taken to explain were this theory excels and what its shortcomings are.

We will then move to so called multi-reference methods, useful for treating actinide systems. Here the difference between static and dynamic correlation will be explained and methods to treat both will be introduced. The concept of an active space will be presented in some detail and guidelines for a successful choice of this active space will be given.

Finally, we will spend some time looking at the fundamental ideas of relativistic quantum chemistry and the effect of relativity on chemical properties. In this part we will also discuss the special requirements relativistic calculations impose.

Keywords: computational chemistry; actinides

  • Invited lecture (Conferences)
    Second Joint Student Workshop on f-Element Chemistry, 09.06.2015, Karlsruhe, Deutschland

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Publ.-Id: 23973