athomic orbit

Hi, everyone!
I'm trying to simulate an atomic orbital in Kangaroo, it means, 4 particles orbiting around a moving nucleus. I managed to make the orbit but its trajectory is not regular, like in an atom. Please, see attached the definition.

Thanks for the help!

Attachments:

atomic orbit.gh, 40 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on February 27, 2016 at 1:56am

This is the classic three-body problem with an extra body thrown in, thus the chaos is completely natural since you don't have quantum mechanics wave functions added in there! To get those, you really need to think in terms of waves instead of particles, or even pure 3D geometric equations that molecular orbitals have the same shape as. All you could do is limit them to a set distance around the nucleus. That's quantum mechanics too, why electrons can't just plunge in and stick to the nucleus which after three do that exact thing in your script, it ends, leaving one electron in space. The electrons move as probability waves, actually, where they don't even have positions, just a likelihood of being detected at a given location, but those waves do act as physical waves in many a sense so can be thought of as objects.

This all very much confused early scientists too.

There are special cases however, that rely on specific starting vectors, in which your four electrons could retain a stable formation indefinitely:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/N-body_choreographies