The electronic structure of water is typically thought of as exhibiting lone pairs of electrons, described by some as "rabbit ears". This is not the universal view, and it does not mesh with an interpretation based on the one-electron wave functions that emerge from molecular orbital theory. Here, we show, by analyzing the 30-dimensional antisymmetrized wave function (Slater determinant) rather than the Hartree product, that the water wave function indeed exhibits equivalent lone pairs. The observed photoelectron spectrum is reconciled with this view, in terms of a relaxation of this structure upon the loss of an electron. Therefore, the lone-pair viewpoint is shown to be completely consistent with both the experimental results and the calculated wave function.

中文翻译：

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可视化水的30维反对称电子结构：孤对的出现。

通常认为水的电子结构表现出孤对的电子，有人将其描述为“兔子的耳朵”。这不是普遍的观点，也不符合基于分子轨道理论出现的单电子波函数的解释。在这里，我们通过分析30维反对称波函数（Slater行列式）而不是Hartree乘积来表明，水波函数确实表现出等效的孤对。观察到的光电子光谱与该观点一致，这是由于电子损失时该结构的弛豫。因此，孤对视点显示出与实验结果和计算出的波动函数完全一致。