Atoms-in-molecules from the stockholder partition of the molecular two-electron distribution

The effective one-electron distributions of bonded atoms obtained from the stockholder partition of the molecular two-electron density are reported. These two-electron stockholder (S) atoms are compared with their one-electron analogs represented by the corresponding Hirshfeld (H) one-electron stockholder pieces of the molecular electron density. The influence of the exchange (Fermi) and Coulomb correlation between electrons on the resultant shapes of bonded atoms is investigated The vertical (for the fixed molecular electron density) and horizontal (involving the electron density displacement) correlation influences on the two-electron stockholder atoms are examined. The two sets of bonded stockholder atoms in the near-dissociation bond-elongated diatomics are compared for different approximations of the electron correlation effects. The cluster components in atomic resolution of the S-partitioning scheme are investigated for illustrative homonuclear and heteronuclear diatomics: H-2, LiH, HF, LiF, and N-2. This framework facilitates an understanding of the origins of the observed differences between the S and H variants of Atoms-in-Molecules. With the exception of hydrogen atoms, especially in light molecules, the two sets of bonded atoms were found to be practically identical. For H2 and LiH the S atoms were shown to exhibit a distinctly higher degree of the bonding character, compared to their H analogs. The main electron correlation effects have been found to be well represented already at the exchangeonly level, e.g., in the unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) theory. An inclusion of the extra vertical Coulomb correlation exerts a marginal moderating influence on the ionic/covalent composition of the chemical bond already predicted by the UHF approximation, in the direction of a slightly more covalent (less ionic) bond character. The horizontal shifts of the molecular density due to Coulomb correlation, relative to the UHF reference, often act in the opposite direction.