Is the molecular Berry phase an artifact of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation?
Quantum Physics
2015-06-18 v1 Chemical Physics
Abstract
We demonstrate that the molecular Berry phase and the corresponding non-analyticity in the electronic Born-Oppenheimer wavefunction is, in general, not a true topological feature of the exact solution of the full electron-nuclear Schr\"odinger equation. For a numerically exactly solvable model we show that a non-analyticity, and the associated geometric phase, only appear in the limit of infinite nuclear mass, while a perfectly smooth behavior is found for any finite nuclear mass.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1402.0227,
title = {Is the molecular Berry phase an artifact of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation?},
author = {S. K. Min and A. Abedi and K. S. Kim and E. K. U. Gross},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.0227},
year = {2015}
}