Antisymmetric trial states

In 1979, an elegant proof of the existence was provided by Levy [10]. He demonstrated that the universal variational functional for the electron-electron repulsion energy of an A -representable trial 1-RDM can be obtained by searching all antisymmetric wavefunctions that yield a fixed D. It was shown that the functional does not require that a trial function for a variational calculation be associated with a ground state of some external potential. Thus the v-representability is not required, only Al-representability. As a result, the 1-RDM functional theories of preceding works were unified. A year later, Valone [19] extended Levy s pure-state constrained search to include all ensemble representable 1-RDMs. He demonstrated that no new constraints are needed in the occupation-number variation of the energy functional. Diverse con-strained-search density functionals by Lieb [20, 21] also afforded insight into this issue. He proved independently that the constrained minimizations exist. 

The original Heitler-London calculation, being for two electrons, did not require any complicated spin and antisymmetrization considerations. It merely used the familiar rules that the spatial part of two-electron wave functions are symmetric in their coordinates for singlet states and antisymmetric for triplet states. Within a short time, however, Slater[10] had invented his determinantal method, and two approaches arose to deal with the twin problems of antisymmetrization and spin state generation. When one is constructing trial wave functions for variational calculations the question arises as to which of the two requirements is to be applied first, antisymmetrization or spin eigenfunction. 

M-electron wavefunction can be expanded as a linear combination of an infinite set of Slater determinants that span the Hilbert space of electrons. These can be any complete set of M-electron antisymmetric functions. One such choice is obtained from the Hartree-Fock method by substituting all excited states for each MO in the determinant. This, of course, requires an infinite number of determinants, derived from an infinite AO basis set, possibly including continuum functions. As in Hartree-Fock, there are no many-body terms explicitly included in Cl expansions either. This failure results in an extremely slow convergence of Cl expansions [9]. Nevertheless, Cl is widely used, and has sparked numerous related schemes that may be used, in principle, to construct trial wavefunctions. 

The variational principle allows one to judge the quality of the obtained solutions. It can be formulated as follows For the arbitrary trial function x that is square-integrable, differentiable, antisymmetric, and depends on the same set of variables as a sought ground state yo function, we have... 

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