Adiabatic electronic flux density: A Born-Oppenheimer broken-symmetry ansatz

The Born-Oppenheimer approximation leads to the counterintuitive result of a vanishing electronic flux density upon vibrational dynamics in the electronic ground state. To circumvent this long known issue, we propose using pairwise antisymmetrically translated vibronic densities to generate a symmetric electronic density that can be forced to satisfy the continuity equation approximately. The so-called Born-Oppenheimer broken-symmetry ansatz yields all components of the flux density simultaneously while requiring only knowledge about the nuclear quantum dynamics on the electronic adiabatic ground-state potential energy surface. The underlying minimization procedure is transparent and computationally inexpensive, and the solution can be computed from the standard output of any quantum chemistry program. Taylor series expansion reveals that the implicit electron dynamics originates from nonadiabatic coupling to the explicit Born-Oppenheimer nuclear dynamics. Our approach is applied to the H-2(+) molecular ion vibrating in its (2)Sigma(+)(g) ground state. The electronic flux density is found to have the correct nodal structure and symmetry properties at all times.