Chemistry Forum

Paper "Tomographic imaging of molecular orbitals" by J. Itatani. in Nature challenges common QM (quantum mechanics) interpretation of orbitals as pure mathematical constructs .
Authors go as far as to say that they experimentally measured HOMO (highest occupied molecular orbital). Is that possible indeed or is it just a wrong interpretation of the experiment?

The paper could be found at: http://spectroscopy.mps.ohio-state.edu/ ... graphy.pdf

Discussion in the blog: Are Orbitals Real?!

Comments and opinions are highly appreciated.

It is great that this topic finally has been brought to attention.
Orbitals has been invented to simplify the math but become so frequently used that one might think they are backed by some physical reality.
The truth is they are not.

Here are some references to learn more about this topic:
1) Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 79 No. 3 March 2002, p 310
2) Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 77 No. 11 November 2000, p 1492
3) International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, Vol 94, 173–177 (2003), p 173

Hello, I've just joined this forum.
The matter of the reality/unreality of molecular orbitals is a very interesting one, is your review finished yet?
By the way, almost three years ago there had been a similar discussion on the
mailing list CCL (Computational Chemistry List), and at the time I had collected the relevant and most interesting posts in file. If anyone is interested in looking at it, it can be found at http://web.tiscali.it/Astro/Orbitals.zip

NB: Only the first few introductory lines are in Italian, the discussion itself is in English

Lorenzo

Hello Lorenzo,

Thanks for the archive - it's quite interesting!
I've just published full text of my review here:
http://vitalii.chemicalblogs.com/2_comp ... _real.html

Regards,
Vitalii

To say the least orbitals are definitley real. The idea of an orbital in an electron is a proprietary concept though. They are dimensionless, rather invisible shells that guide how an electron in an atom moves.