how the shoridenger wave equa
tion to multi electron atom arises the difficulty ?
Answers
Explanation:
It is common knowledge that the Schrödinger equation can be solved exactly only for the simplest of systems - such the so-called toy models (particle in a box, etc), and the Hydrogen atoms; and not for relatively complex systems, such as the Helium atom and other multielectron systems.
I have been trying to get to the reason for this for a long time, and it seems that it has something to do with one or more of these -
Correlation effects between the electrons as in the electrons trying to occupy positions opposite to each other with the nucleus between them.
Some kind of quantum corellation due to entanglement.
Appearance of inseparable 'cross-terms' in the expression for the Hamiltonian.
As in 3 above, we can't figure out to model the fact that we don't know (from our theory) the total energy of the system (while we are making the model), and the kinetic and poten tial energies depend upon each other, so we can't actually find any of these.