New Quantum Mechanics 18: Helium Ground State Revisited

Concerning the ground state and ground state energy of Helium the following illumination can be made:

Standard quantum mechanics describes the ground state of Helium as $1S2$ with a 6d wave function $\psi (x1,x2)$ depending on two 3d Euclidean space coordinates $x1$ and $x2$ of the form

• $\psi (x1,x2) =C \exp(-Z\vert x1\vert )\exp (-Z\vert x2\vert )$,       (1)

with $Z =2$ the kernel charge, and $C$ a normalising constant. This describes two identical spherically symmetric electron distributions as solution of a reduced Schrödinger equation without electronic repulsion potential, with a total energy $E =-4$, way off the observed $-2.903$. 

To handle this discrepancy between model and observation the following corrections in the computation of total energy are made, while keeping the spherically symmetric form (1) of the ground state as the solution of a reduced Schrödinger equation:  

1 . Including Coulomb repulsion energy of (1) gives  $E=-2.75$.

2. Changing the kernel attraction to $Z=2 -5/16$ claiming screening gives $E=-2.85$.

3. Changing Coulomb repulsion by inflating the wave function to depend on $\vert x1-x2\vert$ can give  at best $E=-2.903724...$ to be compared with precise observation according to Nist atomic data base $-2.903385$ thus with an relative error of $0.0001$. Here the dependence on $\vert x1-x2\vert$ of the inflated wave function upon integration with respect to $x2$ reduces to a dependence on only the modulus of $x1$. Thus the inflated non spherically symmetric wave function can be argued to anyway represent two spherically symmetric electronic distributions.

We see that a spherically symmetric ground state of the form (1) is attributed to have correct energy, by suitably modifying the computation of energy so as to give perfect fit with observation. This kind of physics has been very successful and convincing (in particular to physicists), but it may be that it should be subject to critical scientific scrutiny.

The ideal in any case is a model with a solution which ab initio in direct computation has correct energy, not a  model with a solutions which has correct energy only if the computation of energy is changed by some ad hoc trick until match.

The effect of the fix according to 3. is to introduce a correlation between the two electrons to the effect that they would tend appear on opposite sides of the kernel, thus avoiding close contact. Such an effect can be introduced by angular weighting in (1) which can reduce electron repulsion energy but at the expense of increasing kinetic energy by angular variation of wave functions with global support and then seemingly without sufficient net effect. With the local support of the wave functions meeting with a homogeneous Neumann condition (more or less vanishing kinetic energy) of the new model, such an increase of kinetic energy is not present and a good match with observation is obtained.