Question

1. Describe the orbital approximations for the wavefunction of a many-electron atom. What are limitation of the approximation?

Answer 1

The orbital approximation is a method of visualizing electron orbitals for chemical species that have two or more electrons. It does this by modeling a multi-electron atom as a single-electron atom.

We can write the true multi-electron wave function Ψ as the product of the single-electron wave functions for all the electrons in the system.

Ψ = ψ1(r1) ψ2(r2) ψ3(r3)... ψn(rn)

For example, the wave function of a lithium atom would be written:

Ψ = ψ1(r1) ψ2(r2) ψ3(r3)