Ionization Energy - Quantum-mechanical Explanation

Quantum-mechanical Explanation

According to the more complete theory of quantum mechanics, the location of an electron is best described as a probability distribution. The energy can be calculated by integrating over this cloud. The cloud's underlying mathematical representation is the wavefunction which is built from Slater determinants consisting of molecular spin orbitals. These are related by Pauli's exclusion principle to the antisymmetrized products of the atomic or molecular orbitals.

In general, calculating the nth ionization energy requires calculating the energies of and electron systems. Calculating these energies exactly is not possible except for the simplest systems (i.e. hydrogen), primarily because of difficulties in integrating the correlation terms. Therefore, approximation methods are routinely employed, with different methods varying in complexity (computational time) and in accuracy compared to empirical data. This has become a well-studied problem and is routinely done in computational chemistry. At the lowest level of approximation, the ionization energy is provided by Koopmans' theorem.