Electronically excited states Hartree-Fock theory

A more general way to treat systems having an odd number of electrons, and certain electronically excited states of other systems, is to let the individual HF orbitals become singly occupied, as in Figure 6.3. In standard HF theory, we constrain the wavefunction so that every HF orbital is doubly occupied. The idea of unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) theory is to allow the a and yS electrons to have different spatial wavefunctions. In the LCAO variant of UHF theory, we seek LCAO coefficients for the a spin and yS spin orbitals separately. These are determined from coupled matrix eigenvalue problems that are very similar to the closed-shell case. 

The difference between the Hartree-Fock energy and the exact solution of the Schrodinger equation (Figure 60), the so-called correlation energy, can be calculated approximately within the Hartree-Fock theory by the configuration interaction method (Cl) or by a perturbation theoretical approach (Mpller-Plesset perturbation calculation wth order, MPn). Within a Cl calculation the wave function is composed of a linear combination of different Slater determinants. Excited-state Slater determinants are then generated by exciting electrons from the filled SCF orbitals to the virtual ones ... 

We have presented a practical Hartree-Fock theory of atomic and molecular electronic structure for individual electronically excited states that does not involve the use of off-diagonal Lagrange multipliers. An easily implemented method for taking the orthogonality constraints into account (tocia) has been used to impose the orthogonality of the Hartree-Fock excited state wave function of interest to states of lower energy. 

The exponential ansatz given in Eq. [31] is one of the central equations of coupled cluster theory. The exponentiated cluster operator, T, when applied to the reference determinant, produces a new wavefunction containing cluster functions, each of which correlates the motion of electrons within specific orbitals. If T includes contributions from all possible orbital groupings for the N-electron system (that is, T, T2, . , T ), then the exact wavefunction within the given one-electron basis may be obtained from the reference function. The cluster operators, T , are frequently referred to as excitation operators, since the determinants they produce from fl>o resemble excited states in Hartree-Fock theory. Truncation of the cluster operator at specific substi-tution/excitation levels leads to a hierarchy of coupled cluster techniques (e.g., T = Ti + f 2 CCSD T T + T2 + —> CCSDT, etc., where S, D, and... 

We have also added a method of calculating improved virtual orbitals. Our use of this procedure for N electron excited state virtual orbitals (8l) in the framework of the SCF calculation of the N-l electron problem closely resembles those proposed by Huzinaga (82). We have also investigated Huzinagafs recent method for improved virtual orbitals in the extended basis function space (83) This is also a useful procedure where there are convergence problems for the Hartree-Fock calculations for the N-electron occupied space of the excited states. This should also be helpful in optimizing virtual orbitals to use them in perturbation theory expressions. 

Hirata, S., Head-Gordon, M., and Bartlett, R. J. (1999) Configuration interaction singles, time-dependent Hartree-Fock, and time-dependent density functional theory for the electronic excited states of extended systems,/ Chem. Phys., Ill, 10774-10791. 

To use direct dynamics for the study of non-adiabatic systems it is necessary to be able to efficiently and accurately calculate electronic wave functions for excited states. In recent years, density functional theory (DFT) has been gaining ground over traditional Hartree-Fock based SCF calculations for the treatment of the ground state of large molecules. Recent advances mean that so-called time-dependent DFT methods are now also being applied to excited states. Even so, at present, the best general methods for the treatment of the photochemistry of polyatomic organic molecules are MCSCF methods, of which the CASSCF method is particularly powerful. 

---