Hartree Fock: A QM Undergrad Assignment Ahead of its Time?

[Kevin McHugh]

When I took undergrad QM, our last assignment was solving the 4 particle system as a function of inter-nuclear separation. I just read Shankar (30 years later) for a review. There was no mention of SCF theory in the book. Was my instructor ahead of the curve?

 

[gleem]

If a book doesn't discuss multi electron atoms it is unlikely it would discuss the Hartree-Fock method..

 

[George Jones]

It's too specialized and too advanced for most undergrad quantum texts, then or now. When I was a student at about that time, it was in my quantum course, but my prof used it in his research.

I see that it is in texts by Messiah (1957), and by Merzbacher (2nd edition, 1970). It is also in more recent texts by Auletta, Fortunato, and Parisi (2009), and by Konishi and Paffuti (2009).

 

[shadowwarden23]

Did you take a Quantum Chemistry class by chance? I did a class on the QM of atomic bonding in my first semester and we followed McQuarrie's Quantum Chemistry 2nd edition. If I remember correctly, that went into detailed SCF calculations for things like the Helium atom and Hydrogen molecule. In fact, one of my projects in that class was to compute the dipole moment of nitrobenzene.
I didn't really see SCF or any kind of numerical multi-atom quantum method in my 3 upper division QM classes (we followed Griffiths for the first one and Shankar for the other two). My guess would be that it's more a Physical chemistry vs Physics thing.

EDIT: I also know that the QM that chemistry majors do focuses a lot more on SCF and approximations to multi atom systems while spending less time on building the fundamentals (like straight perturbation theory, for instance)