Nodal structure of the electronic Wigner function of many-electron atoms and molecules

On the example of several atomic and small molecular systems, the regular behavior of nodal patterns in the electronic one-particle reduced Wigner function is demonstrated. An expression found earlier relates the nodal pattern solely to the dot-product of the position and the momentum vector, if both arguments are large. An argument analogous to the “bond-oscillatory principle” for momentum densities links the nuclear framework in a molecule to an additional oscillatory term in momenta parallel to bonds. It is shown that these are visible in the Wigner function in terms of characteristic nodes. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.