Robert Mulliken and the Molecular Orbitals.
On June 7 1896 American physicist chemist and Nobel Laureatewas born. He is primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Robert Mulliken truly followed in his father's footsteps, who was a professor of organic chemistry at theWhile the young Robert Mulliken learned the name and botanical classification of plants his excellent memory and general intelligencewas noticed. He managed to learn the German language so well in younger years that he was allowed to skip the course in scientific German in college. His interest in chemistry grew early as well. Mulliken with some of the editorial work when his father wrote his four-volume text on organic compound identification. Already as an undergraduate student at MIT he conducted his first publishable research on the synthesis of organic chlorides. When he graduated, the United States had just entered World War I and the young scientist was drafted into the Army's Chemical Warfare Service One year after the war, he entered the Ph.D program at the University of Chicago and received his doctorate based on research into the separation of isotopes of mercury by evaporation. There, he was also introduced to the world of the old quantum theory by the Nobel Prize physicist Robert A. Millikan. Mulliken to the University of Harvard in order to learn spectrographic technique from Frederick A. Saunders and quantum theory from E. C. Kemble. By that time, he was acquainted with several prominent scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer. In the later 1920s he travelled through Europe to work with experts in quantum theory and spectroscopy like Schrödinger Dirac Born Heisenberg and Friedrich Hund by whom he was highly influenced. Hund was back then the assistant of Max Born and had been working on quantum interpretation of band spectra of diatomic molecules, the same spectra which Mulliken investigated at Harvard. They worked together in 1927 and as a result, both published the famous molecular orbital theory It revolves around electrons, which are assigned to states that extend over an entire molecule. The theory originally well known as the Hund-Mulliken theory the term orbital was introduced by Mulliken 1932 and about one year later, the theory been accepted as valid and useful. However, the probably first quantitative use of molecular orbital theory was the 1929 paper of Lennard-Jones and in 1938 the British scientist Charles Coulson made the presumably first accurate calculation of a molecular orbital wavefunction on the hydrogen molecule. In the years after his masterpiece, Robert Mulliken taught at the New York University's physics department. At this time, he was first recognized as a physicist as well and was appointed full professor at the University of Chicago in 1931. In 1936 he became the youngest member of the. At yovisto, you may be interested in a video lecture introducing the Molecular Orbital Theory.