Dr. Leonardo Belpassi, Instituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Chimiche del CNR (SCITEC-CNR), Perugia, Italia.
June 2024
18h, 3 CFU
Students learn principles of chemistry on examples of light elements, the ones from the first three periods, and the rest of elements are mentioned only sporadically. Thus, most students thus have little opportunity to be acquainted with heavy elements in purely chemical sense, that is, to learn something about structure of their compounds and their properties. In this course I will introduce, in a gentle manner, some basics of relativistic effects in the electronic structure of atoms and molecules, relativistic theory of many-electron systems including the Dirac equation and some transformations of the Dirac equation to two-component form. A particular attention will be devoted to the understanding of the spin-orbit coupling effects in atoms and molecules. Applications of relativistic methods of quantum chemistry will be introduced and examples of their application in heavy-element chemistry will be presented.