Hacker News Reader

in QM the spherical harmonics are more of a basis space for electronic state and not the actual electronic state, right? So does that mean there are other ways to think about electron configurations that satisfy Shrodinger etc?

View on HN

Yes - for example when modeling solid materials it’s common to use a plane wave basis set for the electronic wave function instead of atomic orbitals

Spherical harmonics are exact solutions to electronic states for hydrogen-«style» atoms.

... for the angular dependence; there is also radial dependence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com