Non-Born-Oppenheimer electronic and nuclear densities for a Hooke-Calogero three-particle model: Non-uniqueness of density-derived molecular structure

Abstract

We consider the calculation of non-Born-Oppenheimer, nBO, one-particle densities for both electrons and nuclei. We show that the nBO one-particle densities evaluated in terms of translationally invariant coordinates are independent of the wavefunction describing the motion of center of mass of the whole system. We show that they depend, however, on an arbitrary reference point from which the positions of the vectors labeling the particles are determined. We examine the effect that this arbitrary choice has on the topology of the one-particle density by selecting the Hooke-Calogero model of a three-body system for which expressions for the one-particle densities can be readily obtained in analytic form. We extend this analysis to the one-particle densities obtained from full Coulomb interaction wavefunctions for three-body systems. We conclude, in view of the fact that there is a close link between the choice of the reference point and the topology of one-particle densities that the molecular structure inferred from the topology of these densities is not unique. We analyze the behavior of one-particle densities for the Hooke-Calogero Born-Oppenheimer, BO, wavefunction and show that topological transitions are also present in this case for a particular mass value of the light particles even though in the BO regime the nuclear masses are infinite. In this vein, we argue that the change in topology caused by variation of the mass ratio between light and heavy particles does not constitute a true indication in the nBO regime of the emergence of molecular structure.