Atomic Hamiltonian many-electron atom

At this point, it is appropriate to make some conmrents on the construction of approximate wavefiinctions for the many-electron problems associated with atoms and molecules. The Hamiltonian operator for a molecule is given by the general fonn... 

In a recent paper Ostrovsky has criticized my claiming that electrons cannot strictly have quantum numbers assigned to them in a many-electron system (Ostrovsky, 2001). His point is that the Hartree-Fock procedure assigns all the quantum numbers to all the electrons because of the permutation procedure. However this procedure still fails to overcome the basic fact that quantum numbers for individual electrons such as t in a many-electron system fail to commute with the Hamiltonian of the system. As aresult the assignment is approximate. In reality only the atom as a whole can be said to have associated quantum numbers, whereas individual electrons cannot. 

Now consider a d ion as an example of a so-called many-electron atom. Here, each electron possesses kinetic energy, is attracted to the (shielded) nucleus and is repelled by the other electron. We write the Hamiltonian operator for this as follows ... 

Applying the permutation operator P12 is therefore equivalent to interchanging rows of the determinant in Eq. (2.15). Having devised a method for constructing many-electron wavefunctions as a product of MOs, the final problem concerns the form of the many-electron Hamiltonian which contains terms describing the interaction of a given electron with (a) the fixed atomic nuclei and (b) the remaining (N— 1) electrons. The first step is therefore to decompose H(l, 2, 3,..., N) into a sum of operators Hj and H2, where ... 

Unfortunately, the Schrodinger equation for multi-electron atoms and, for that matter, all molecules cannot be solved exactly and does not lead to an analogous expression to Equation 4.5 for the quantised energy levels. Even for simple atoms such as sodium the number of interactions between the particles increases rapidly. Sodium contains 11 electrons and so the correct quantum mechanical description of the atom has to include 11 nucleus-electron interactions, 55 electron-electron repulsion interactions and the correct description of the kinetic energy of the nucleus and the electrons - a further 12 terms in the Hamiltonian. The analysis of many-electron atomic spectra is complicated and beyond the scope of this book, but it was one such analysis performed by Sir Norman Lockyer that led to the discovery of helium on the Sun before it was discovered on the Earth. 

Quantum numbers and shapes of atomic orbitals Let us denote the one-electron hydrogenic Hamiltonian operator by h, to distinguish it from the many-electron H used elsewhere in this book. This operator contains terms to represent the electronic kinetic energy ( e) and potential energy of attraction to the nucleus (vne),... 

We assume for simplicity that the two-electron atom is described by a Hamiltonian (29) in which //(I) and //(2) are the hydrogen-like Dirac Hamiltonians and h, 2) = 0. Apparently, after this simplification the problem is trivial since it becomes separable to two one-electron problems. Nevertheless we present this example because it sheds some light upon formulations of the minimax principle in a many-electron case. 

Neglecting spin-orbit contributions (smaller than other relativistic corrections for the ground state of atoms, and zero for closed-shell ones), the Breit hamiltonian in the Pauli approximation [25] (weak relativistic systems) can be written for a many electron system as ... 

Because electrons interact pairwise, the many-electron Hamiltonian for any atom or molecule can be written... 

Here, F is a many-electron wavefunction and H is the so-called Hamiltonian operator (or more simply the Hamiltonian), which in atomic units is given by. 

Because the total Hamiltonian of a many-electron atom or molecule forms a mutually commutative set of operators with S2, Sz, and A = (V l/N )Ep sp P, the exact eigenfunctions of H must be eigenfunctions of these operators. Being an eigenfunction of A forces the eigenstates to be odd under all Pp. Any acceptable model or trial wavefunction should be constrained to also be an eigenfunction of these symmetry operators. 

The orbitals of an atom are labeled by 1 and m quantum numbers the orbitals belonging to a given energy and 1 value are 21+1- fold degenerate. The many-electron Hamiltonian, H, of an atom and the antisymmetrizer operator A = (V l/N )Ep sp P commute with total Lz =Ej Lz (i), as in the linear-molecule case. The additional symmetry present in the spherical atom reflects itself in the fact that Lx, and Ly now also commute with H and A. However, since Lz does not commute with Lx or Ly, new quantum... 

We demonstrated that by the selection of a representation of the Dirac Hamiltonian in the spinor space one may strongly influence the performance of the variational principle. In a vast majority of implementations the standard Pauli representation has been used. Consequently, computational algorithms developed in relativistic theory of many-electron systems have been constructed so that they are applicable in this representation only. The conditions, under which the results of these implementations are reliable, are very well understood and efficient numerical codes are available for both atomic and molecular calculations (see e.g. [16]). However, the representation of Weyl, if the external potential is non-spherical, or the representation of Biedenharn, in spherically-symmetric cases, seem to be attractive and, so far, hardly explored options. 

Because of interelectronic repulsions, the Schrodinger equation for many-electron atoms and molecules cannot be solved exactly. The two main approximation methods used are the variation method and perturbation theory. The variation method is based on the following theorem. Given a system with time-independent Hamiltonian //, then if

well-behaved function that satisfies the boundary conditions of the problem, one can show (by expanding

[Pg.271]

With internal nuclear motion neglected, the Hamiltonian for a many-electron atom with atomic number Z is... 

The application of quantum-mechanical methods to the prediction of electronic structure has yielded much detailed information about atomic and molecular properties.13 Particularly in the past few years, the availability of high-speed computers with large storage capacities has made it possible to examine both atomic and molecular systems using an ab initio variational approach wherein no empirical parameters are employed.14 Variational calculations for molecules employ a Hamiltonian based on the nonrelativistic electrostatic nuclei-electron interaction and a wave function formed by antisymmetrizing a suitable many-electron function of spatial and spin coordinates. For most applications it is also necessary that the wave function represent a particular spin eigenstate and that it have appropriate geometric symmetry. 

While using (4.14) and exact wave functions. This supports the conclusion of Drake [83] that for electric dipole transitions, by considering the commutator of with the atomic Hamiltonian in the Pauli approximation, we obtain Qwith relativistic corrections of order v2/c2 (see (4.18)-(4.20)). However, for many-electron atoms and ions, one has to use approximate (e.g., Hartree-Fock) wave functions, and then this term gives non-zero contribution, conditioned by the inaccuracy of the model adopted. 

Thus, we have expressed the non-relativistic Hamiltonian of a many-electron atom with relativistic corrections of order a2 in the framework of the Breit operator (formulas (1.15), (1.18)—(1.22)) in terms of the irreducible tensorial operators (second term in (1.15), formulas (19.5)—(19.8), (19.10)— (19.14), (19.20), respectively). 

Dependence of the main terms of the Hamiltonian of a many-electron atom on nuclear charge Z may be easily revealed in the following fashion. Let us consider the Hamiltonian of the kind (1.15)... 

Analytic, exact solutions cannot be obtained except for the simplest systems, i.e. hydrogen-like atoms with just one electron and one nucleus. Good approximate solutions can be found by means of the self-consistent field (SCF) method, the details of which need not concern us. If all the electrons have been explicitly considered in the Hamiltonian, the wave functions V, will be many-electron functions V, will contain the coordinates of all the electrons, and a complete electron density map can be obtained by plotting Vf. The associated energies E, are the energy states of the molecule (see Section 2.6) the lowest will be the ground state , and the calculated energy differences En — El should match the spectroscopic transitions in the electronic spectrum. 

In non-relativistic perturbative atomic Z-expansion theory, as recently sum-marked [11], a new scaled length, p = Zr, and a scaled energy, e= T2 E, are introduced in the many-electron wave equation. That is, the units of length and energy are changed to 1/Z and Z2 a.u., respectively. The Hamiltonian then takes the form... 

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