A method of calculating atomic and molecular structure directly from the first principles of quantum mechanics, without using quantities derived from experiment (such as ionization energies found by spectroscopy) as parameters.
Ab-initio calculations require a large amount of numerical computation; the amount of computing time required increases rapidly as the size of the atom or molecule increases. The development of computing power has enabled the properties of both small and large molecules to be calculated accurately, so that this form of calculation can now replace “semi-empirical calculations. Ab-initio calculations can, for example, be used to determine the bond lengths and bond angles of molecules by calculating the total energy of the molecule for a variety of molecular geometries and finding which conformation has the lowest energy.
