Pauli-Breit Hamiltonian

The second term on the right-hand side of the equation gives for point nuclei directly the one-electron spin-orhit operator (2) of the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian and can he eliminated to give a spin-free equation that becomes equivalent to the Schrddinger equation in the non-relativistic limit. In a quaternion formulation of the Dirac equation the elimination becomes particularly simple. The algebra of the quaternion units is that of the Pauli spin matrices... 

The two parts of this formula are derived from the same QED Feynman diagram for interaction of two electrons in the Coulomb gauge. The first term is the Coulomb potential and the second part, the Breit interaction, represents the mutual energy of the electron currents on the assumption that the virtual photon responsible for the interaction has a wavelength long compared with system dimensions. The DCB hamiltonian reduces to the complete standard Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian [9, 21.1], including all the relativistic and spin-dependent correction terms, when the electrons move nonrelativistically. 

From Dirac-Breit to Breit-Pauli Hamiltonians 189... 

In this review we shall first establish the theoretical foundations of the semi-classical theory that eventually lead to the formulation of the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian. The latter is an approximation suited to make the connection to phenomenological model Hamiltonians like the Heisenberg Hamiltonian for the description of electronic spin-spin interactions. The complete derivations have been given in detail in Ref. (21), but turn out to be very involved and are thus scattered over many pages in Ref. (21). For this reason, we aim here at a summary that is as brief and concise as possible so that all relevant connections between different levels of approximation are evident. This allows us to connect present-day quantum chemical methods to phenomenological Hamiltonians and hence to establish and review the current status of these first-principles methods applied to transition-metal clusters. 

The Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian is an approximation up to 1/c2 to the Dirac-Coulomb-Breit Hamiltonian obtained from a free-particle Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation. Because of the convergence issues mentioned in the preceding section, the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian may only be employed in perturbation theory and not in a variational procedure. The derivation of the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian is tedious (21). 

The Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian with an external field contains all standard one- and two-electron contributions as well as the magnetic interaction of the electrons and their interactions with an external electromagnetic field. We may group the various contributions in the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian according to one-and two-electron terms,... 

In order to readily compare these terms to their expressions in the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian given for example in Refs. (21,54), we insert the definition of the electric field strength E, and the... 

In contrast to the one-electron terms, the reduction of the 4x4 Dirac-Breit Hamiltonian to the 2x2 Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian is very tedious for the two-electron terms as each interaction term has to be transformed according to the Foldy-Wouthuysen protocol. As the derivation can be found for example in Refs. (56-58) and in detail in Ref. (21), we only present here the transformed terms and discuss their dimension. The two-electron Breit-Pauli operator gBP (i, j) reads... 

Though the ESR Hamiltonian is typically expressed in terms of effective electronic and nuclear spins, it can, of course, also be derived from the more fundamental Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian, when the magnetic fields produced by the moving nuclei are explicitly taken into account. In order to see this, we shall recall that in classical electrodynamics the magnetic dipole equation can be derived in a multipole expansion of the current density. For the lowest order term the expansion yields (59)... 

The nuclear spins give rise to additional terms in the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian due to the interaction of the electrons with the magnetic moment of the nuclei and the electrostatic interaction with the electric quadrupole interaction of the nuclei. The magnetic interaction term of the spins with the nuclei is of the same type as the spin-spin interaction and following Abragam and Pryce (61) can be written as... 

In ESR spectroscopy the terms in the effective Hamiltonian are typically expressed by virtue of effective coupling matrices or tensors, whereas in this review we shall relate them to their corresponding terms in the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian. The effective coupling matrices parametrize the electronic structure of the molecule under study and can be calculated from the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian by employing a suitable representation of the molecular wave function. 

The nuclear Zeeman term describes the interaction of the nuclear spins with the external magnetic field. Just as the hyperfine splitting, this term is not incorporated in the original purely electronic Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian as presented in Eqs. (59) and (60) but becomes relevant for ESR spectroscopy. 

Though the true electron spin operators were employed here as well as in the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian, the phenomenological Spin Hamiltonian, in which the spin coupling is an exchange effect, is in sharp contrast to the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian, that is including the (magnetic) spin-spin interactions. Since the exchange effect is an effect introduced by the Pauli principle imposed on the wave function, we may write the electron-electron interaction as an expectation value,... 

The spin operators Sx, and Sg which occur in the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian form a basis for the Lie algebra of SU(2). The concept of the electron as a spinning particle has arisen through the isomorphism between SU(2) and the angular momentum operators. This analogy is unnecessary and often undesirable. 

Many electronic systems are well described by the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian... 

Here r is the radius vector of the single unpaired electron, k = 1,2,3, denote the positions of the nuclei, and q is the effective charge of the three identical nuclei. The Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian of this system is [17]... 

The Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian for a single unpaired electron in the field of four identical atomic centers reads... 

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