NODAL STRUCTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC WIGNER FUNCTION OF MANY-ELECTRON ATOMS AND MOLECULES

On the example of several atomic and small molecular systems, the regu lar behavior of nodal patterns in the electronic one-particle reduced Wigner function is demonstrated. An expression found earlier relates t he nodal pattern solely to the dot-product of the position and the mom entum vector, if both arguments are large. An argument analogous to th e ''bond-oscillatory principle'' for momentum densities Links the nucl ear framework in a molecule to an additional oscillatory term in momen ta parallel to bonds. It is shown that these are visible in the Wigner function in terms of characteristic nodes. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons , Inc.