Dirac-Hartree-Fock codes

Tupitsyn, I. I. HFDB 2003. Program for atomic finite-difference four-component Dirac-Hartree-Fock-Breit calculations written on the base of the hfd code [110]. 

Aspects of the relativistic theory of quantum electrodynamics are first reviewed in the context of the electronic structure theory of atoms and molecules. The finite basis set parametrization of this theory is then discussed, and the formulation of the Dirac-Hartree-Fock-Breit procedure presented with additional detail provided which is specific to the treatment of atoms or molecules. Issues concerned with the implementation of relativistic mean-field methods are outlined, including the computational strategies adopted in the BERTHA code. Extensions of the formalism are presented to include open-shell cases, and the accommodation of some electron correlation effects within the multi-configurational Dirac-Hartree-Fock approximation. We conclude with a survey of representative applications of the relativistic self-consistent field method to be found in the literature. 

The relativistic theory and computation of atomic structures and processes has therefore attained some sort of maturity and the various codes now available are widely used. Those mentioned so far were based on ideas originating from Hartree and his students [28], and have been developed in much the same way as the non-relativistic self-consistent field theory recorded in [28-30]. All these methods rely on the numerical solution, using finite differences, of the coupled differential equations for radial orbital wave-functions of the self-consistent field. This makes them unsuitable for the study of molecules, for which it is preferable to expand the radial amplitudes in a suitably chosen set of analytic functions. This nonrelativistic matrix Hartree-Fock method, as it is often termed, was pioneered by Hall and Lennard-Jones [31], Hall [32,33] and Roothaan [34,35], and it was Roothaan s students, Synek [36] and Kim [37] who were the first to attempt to solve the corresponding matrix Dirac-Hartree-Fock equations. Kim was able to obtain solutions for the ground state of neon in 1967, but at the expense of some numerical instability, and it seemed at the time that the matrix Dirac-Hartree-Fock scheme would not be a serious competitor to the finite difference codes. 

Figure 1. Total nonrelativistic multi-configuration Hartree-Fock energy, relativistic corrections (estimated as the difference between the multi-configuration Dirac-Hartree-Fock and Hartree-Fock energies) and correlation contributions (estimated from correlation energy density functional calculations) for the group 4 elements. The multi-configuration treatments were carried out with the atomic structure code GRASP [78] and correspond to complete active space calculations with the open valence p shell as active space. The nonrelativistic results were obtained by multiplying the velocity of light with a factor of 10 .

The implementation of this approach requires atomic all-electron calculations for each atom of interest, which could be spin-free or full Dirac-Hartree-Fock calculations. The spherically averaged electron density is then fitted to a suitable series of s Gaussians. This procedure only needs to be done once and the fitted density stored. In the molecular calculation, the fitted densities are read and the integrals can be evaluated using code for the one-eleetron spin-orbit integrals for a finite nucleus. Such an approach has been suggested by van Wtillen (2004). 

The purpose of this contribution is to give an overview of the results which center around the atomic density function and the recovery of the periodicity. Since all the calculations are based on atomic density functions, it is appropriate to revisit the construction of these densities in some depth. First a workable definition of the density function is established in the framework of the multi-configuration Hartree-Fock method (MCHF) [2] and the spherical harmonic content of the density function is discussed. A spherical density function is established in a natural way, by using spherical tensor operators. The proposed expression can be evaluated for any multi-configuration state function corresponding to an atom in a particular well-defined state and a recently developed extension of the MCHF code [3] is used for that purpose. Three illustrative examples are given. In the next section relativistic density functions for the relativistic Dirac-Hartree-Fock method [4] are defined. The latter will be used for a thorough analysis of the influence of relativistic effects on electron density functions later on in this paper. 

Fig. 5.18. Spin-orbit splittings for the nf series of Ba+, showing that good agreement is obtained between g Hartree and experimental values. For comparison, Dirac-Fock (labelled DHF) and multiconfigurational Dirac-Fock (labelled MCDF) curves computed from the same code are also shown (after J.-P. Con-nerade and K. Dietz [230]).

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