Orbital-based Descriptions of Electron Configurations, Ionization, Excitation, and Bonding

This chapter deals with quantitative aspects of molecular orbital (MO) theory: Construction of an orbital diagram, bonding and antibonding overlap, Koopmans’ theorem, orbital energies versus total energies, an explanation of the unintuitive ground state electron configurations seen for some neutral transition metals, and a discussion of orbital energy gaps versus electronic excitations and other observable energy gaps. Localized MOs show the chemical bonds expected from the Lewis structure more readily than the canonical orbitals obtained from solving the SCF equations. It is shown that the delocalization of localized, not the canonical, MOs shows whether a system is delocalized. Algorithms by which to obtain localized MOs are sketched.