Geometric energy transfer in two-component systems

Factoring a wave function into marginal and conditional factors partitions the subsystem kinetic energy into two terms. The first depends solely on the marginal wave function, through its gauge-covariant derivative, while the second depends on the quantum metric of the conditional wave function over the manifold of marginal variables. We derive an identity for the rate of change of the second term. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Chemistry without the Born–Oppenheimer approximation’.