Fermi contact Hamiltonian

The Fermi contact Hamiltonian may, in first-quantized language, be written as... 

The spin Hamiltonian operates only on spin wavefunctions, and all details of the electronic wavefunction are absorbed into the coupling constant a. If we treat the Fermi contact term as a perturbation on the wavefunction theR use of standard perturbation theory gives a first-order energy... 

The complete Hamiltonian of the molecular system can be wrihen as H +H or H =H +H for the commutator being linear, where is the Hamiltonian corresponding to the spin contribution(s) such as, Fermi contact term, dipolar term, spin-orbit coupling, etc. (5). As a result, H ° would correspond to the spin free part of the Hamiltonian, which is usually employed in the electron propagator implementation. Accordingly, the k -th pole associated with the complete Hamiltonian H is , so that El is the A -th pole of the electron propagator for the spin free Hamiltonian H . 

We have previously defined the one-electron spin-density matrix in the context of standard HF methodology (Eq. (6.9)), which includes semiempirical methods and both the UHF and ROHF implementations of Hartree-Fock for open-shell systems. In addition, it is well defined at the MP2, CISD, and DFT levels of theory, which permits straightforward computation of h.f.s. values at many levels of theory. Note that if the one-electron density matrix is not readily calculable, the finite-field methodology outlined in the last section allows evaluation of the Fermi contact integral by an appropriate perturbation of the quantum mechanical Hamiltonian. 

The remaining important interactions which can occur for a 2 or3X molecule involve the presence of nuclear spin. Interactions between the electron spin and nuclear spin magnetic moments are called hyperfine interactions, and there are two important ones. The first is called the Fermi contact interaction, and if both nuclei have non-zero spin, each interaction is represented by the Hamiltonian term... 

The first-order contribution of these hyperfine interactions to the effective electronic Hamiltonian involves the diagonal matrix elements of the individual operator terms over the electronic wave function, see equation (7.43). As before, we factorise out those terms which involve the electronic spin and spatial coordinates. For example, for the Fermi contact term we need to evaluate matrix elements of the type ... 

The next term in the magnetic hyperfine Hamiltonian (8.351) describes the Fermi contact interaction and the calculation of its matrix elements proceeds in a manner similar to that just described for the orbital hyperfine term, as follows ... 

Freund, Herbst, Mariella and Klemperer [112] expressed their magnetic hyperfine constants in the form originally given by Frosch and Foley [117]. As discussed elsewhere in this book, particularly in chapters 9, 10 and 11, we prefer to separate the different physical interactions, particularly the Fermi contact and dipolar interactions, in our effective Hamiltonian. This separation is usually made by other authors even when the effective Hamiltonian is expressed in terms of Frosch and Foley constants, because it is the natural route if the molecular physics of a problem is to be understood. Nevertheless since so many authors, particularly of the earlier papers, use the magnetic hyperfine theory presented by Frosch and Foley, we present in appendix 8.5 a detailed comparison of their effective Hamiltonian with that adopted in this book. The merit of the Frosch and Foley parameters is that they form the linear combination of parameters which is best determined (i.e. with least correlation) for a molecule which conforms to Hund s case (a) coupling. The values of the constants determined experimentally from the 7 LiO spectrum were therefore, in our notation (in MHz) ... 

The constant b therefore contains contributions from two quite different magnetic interactions, the Fermi contact and the electron-nuclear dipolar interactions. Interpretation of the magnitudes of these constants in terms of electronic structure theory always involves the separate assessment of these different effects, so that we prefer to use an effective Hamiltonian which separates them at the outset. Consequently the effective magnetic hyperfine Hamiltonian used throughout this book is... 

We turn now to the magnetic hyperftne Hamiltonian in (9.30) which may be written as the sum of three terms representing the orbital, Fermi contact and dipolar hyperfine... 

The inversion operation i which leads to the g/u classification of the electronic states is not a true symmetry operation because it does not commute with the Fermi contact hyperfine Hamiltonian. The operator i acts within the molecule-fixed axis system on electron orbital and vibrational coordinates only. It does not affect electron or nuclear spin coordinates and therefore cannot be used to classify the total wave function of the molecule. Since g and u are not exact labels, it was realised by Bunker and Moss [265] that electric dipole pure rotational transitions were possible in ll], the g/u symmetry breaking (and simultaneous ortho-para mixing) being relatively large for levels very close to the dissociation asymptote. The electric dipole transition moment for the 19,1 19,0 rotational transition in the ground electronic state was calculated... 

The fourth and last terms in (11.49) are spin-orbit distortion corrections to the spin-rotation and Fermi contact interactions. The hyperfine and quadrupole terms in this Hamiltonian refer to the 14N nucleus. 

The coupling tensor (P) to the paramagnetic ion produces two main sources of additional field. One is the Fermi contact or hyperfine interaction. The general form of the contact interaction produces a Hamiltonian... 

In this Hamiltonian (5) corresponds to the orbital angular momentum interacting with the external magnetic field, (6) represents the diamagnetic (second-order) response of the electrons to the magnetic field, (7) represents the interaction of the nuclear dipole with the electronic orbital motion, (8) is the electronic-nuclear Zeeman correction, the two terms in (9) represent direct nuclear dipole-dipole and electron coupled nuclear spin-spin interactions. The terms in (10) are responsible for spin-orbit and spin-other-orbit interactions and the terms in (11) are spin-orbit Zeeman gauge corrections. Finally, the terms in (12) correspond to Fermi contact and dipole-dipole interactions between the spin magnetic moments of nucleus N and an electron. Since... 

We will see later that the Fermi contact term follows from another Hamiltonian term. 

Let us start with the field-free SO effects. Perturbation by SO coupling mixes some triplet character into the formally closed-shell ground-state wavefunction. Therefore, electronic spin has to be dealt with as a further degree of freedom. This leads to hyperfine interactions between electronic and nuclear spins, in a BP framework expressed as Fermi-contact (FC) and spin-dipolar (SD) terms (in other quasirelativistic frameworks, the hyperfine terms may be contained in a single operator, see e.g. [34,40,39]). Thus, in addition to the first-order and second-order ct at the nonrelativistic level (eqs. 5-7), third-order contributions to nuclear shielding (8) arise, that couple the one- and two-electron SO operators (9) and (10) to the FC and SD Hamiltonians (11) and (12), respectively. Throughout this article, we will follow the notation introduced in [58,61,62], where these spin-orbit shielding contributions were denoted... 

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