Uncommon
Born–Oppenheimer approximation
Assumption that motions of nuclei and electrons can be separated
Born–Oppenheimer approximation
In quantum chemistry and molecular physics, the Born–Oppenheimer (BO) approximation is the assumption that the wave functions of atomic nucleus and electrons in a molecule can be treated separately, based on the fact that the nucleus are much heavier than the electrons. Due to the larger relative mass of a nucleus compared to an electron, the coordinates of the nuclei in a system are approximated as fixed, while the coordinates of the electrons are dynamic. The approach is named after Max Born and his 23-year-old graduate student J. Robert Oppenheimer, the latter of whom proposed it in 1927 during a period of intense ferment in the development of quantum mechanics. The approximation is widely used in quantum chemistry to speed up the computation of molecular wavefunctions and other properties for large molecules. There are cases where the assumption of separable motion no longer holds, which make the approximation lose validity (it is said to "break down"), but even then the approximation...
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