Energy total, using Hartree-Fock

Ihe one-electron orbitals are commonly called basis functions and often correspond to he atomic orbitals. We will label the basis functions with the Greek letters n, v, A and a. n the case of Equation (2.144) there are K basis functions and we should therefore xpect to derive a total of K molecular orbitals (although not all of these will necessarily 3e occupied by electrons). The smallest number of basis functions for a molecular system vill be that which can just accommodate all the electrons in the molecule. More sophisti- ated calculations use more basis functions than a minimal set. At the Hartree-Fock limit he energy of the system can be reduced no further by the addition of any more basis unctions however, it may be possible to lower the energy below the Hartree-Fock limit ay using a functional form of the wavefunction that is more extensive than the single Slater determinant. 

Gas phase total matrix Hartree-Fock energies for N2,BF, CO, NO from calculations using some standard basis setsF... 

Total matrix Hartree-Fock energies for some closed-shell atoms obtained by, using basis sets of exponential-type functions. ... 

If one uses a Slater detemiinant to evaluate the total electronic energy and maintains the orbital nomialization, then the orbitals can be obtained from the following Hartree-Fock equations ... 

A more useful quantity for comparison with experiment is the heat of formation, which is defined as the enthalpy change when one mole of a compound is formed from its constituent elements in their standard states. The heat of formation can thus be calculated by subtracting the heats of atomisation of the elements and the atomic ionisation energies from the total energy. Unfortunately, ab initio calculations that do not include electron correlation (which we will discuss in Chapter 3) provide uniformly poor estimates of heats of formation w ith errors in bond dissociation energies of 25-40 kcal/mol, even at the Hartree-Fock limit for diatomic molecules. 

DFT has come to the fore in molecular calculations as providing a relatively cheap and effective method for including important correlation effects in the initial and final states. ADFT methods have been used, but by far the most popular approach is that based on Slater s half electron transition state theory [73] and its developments. Unlike Hartree-Fock theory, DFT has no Koopmans theorem that relates the orbital energies to an ionisation potential, instead it has been shown that the orbital energy (e,) is related to the gradient of the total energy E(N) of an N-electron system, with respect to the occupation number of the 2th orbital ( , ) [74],... 

---