How large are nonadiabatic effects in atomic and diatomic systems?

Yubo Yang, Ilkka Kylänpää, Norm M. Tubman, Jaron T. Krogel, Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, David M. Ceperley

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    14 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    With recent developments in simulating nonadiabatic systems to high accuracy, it has become possible to determine how much energy is attributed to nuclear quantum effects beyond zero-point energy. In this work, we calculate the non-relativistic ground-state energies of atomic and molecular systems without the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. For this purpose, we utilize the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method, in which the nodes depend on both the electronic and ionic positions. We report ground-state energies for all systems studied, ionization energies for the first-row atoms and atomization energies for the first-row hydrides. We find the ionization energies of the atoms to be nearly independent of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, within the accuracy of our results. The atomization energies of molecular systems, however, show small effects of the nonadiabatic coupling between electrons and nuclei.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number124308
    JournalJournal of Chemical Physics
    Volume143
    Issue number12
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Sep 28 2015

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