Quantum Chemistry II

Quantum Chemistry II is where the single-particle Schrödinger picture from CHEM 327 gets extended to the real objects chemists care about: many-electron atoms and molecules, with spin, antisymmetry, and the Pauli principle taken seriously. You'll spend the semester working through variational and perturbation problems, building Slater determinants, running Hartree-Fock and Hückel calculations by hand, and reading MO correlation diagrams, assessed through three homework-quiz cycles plus two midterms and a final. The payoff is that you finish able to read the literature on ab-initio and semi-empirical electronic structure methods, which is the foundation for computational chemistry, spectroscopy, and most physical-chemistry electives that follow.