# Muonic Modeling

I have seen an article[1] that describes a HF approach to working with exotic muonic atoms. I am curious about how far DFT has been extended for modeling muonic chemistry. Are there psuedopotentials avilable in any code for muonic substitutions into an element for example or is this something DFT fails to capture correctly?

Available implementations of DFT are capable of studying positive muons ($$\mu^{+}$$) because from an electronic point of view they are the same as protons (H$$^{+}$$). This effectively means that all calculations involving protons can be straight-forwardly re-interpreted as calculations involving muons (with the caveats detailed below). In this context, two situations are commonly studied: (i) a positive muon, which is equivalent to adding a positively charged proton (charged defect), (ii) muonium, a situation in which the positive muon binds to an electron (neutral defect). Although in principle it is straight-forward to simulate positive muons in DFT, here are a few things to consider:
3. Quantum zero-point motion. Up to this point, the discussion has been entirely equivalent between $$\mu^{+}$$ and H$$^+$$. This is because these two particles are entirely equivalent from an electronic point of view. Where they differ is in their mass, and this is reflected in the vibrational contribution to the energy, which is mostly dominated by quantum fluctuations (zero-point motion) for light particles such as muons or protons. This means that to simulate muons one must carefully consider the vibrational contribution. A reasonable starting point would be to treat vibrations at the harmonic level of theory, but the light mass of the muon will almost always require the inclusion of anharmonic terms too. Another early interesting idea for simulating the vibrational properties of muons is a "double" Born-Oppenheimer approximation, in which the degrees of freedom of the system are separated into three (rather than the usual two) groups: electrons (small mass), muons (intermediate mass), and the rest of atoms in the system (large mass), as described here.