Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals, vacant

The greater the number of functions 4 J, belonging to the orthonormal set, the more completely and in more detail the spectrum of the /(-decay-induced excitations of a molecule can be calculated. Consequently, the method for calculating the wave functions of the daughter ion must be such that at a reasonable volume of calculation we would be able to construct a sufficiently large number of multielectron wave functions of excited states. The Hartree Fock method allows one to construct the wave functions of excited states as the combinations of determinants symmetrized in a certain way. Within this method the excitation is considered to be a transition of an electron from an occupied Hartree-Fock molecular orbital into a vacant one. 

However, the vacant Hartree-Fock molecular orbital (MO) obtained as a by-product of the ground-state calculations are of little use for describing the excited states of a molecule. This is due to the fact that the vacant Hartree-Fock MOs correspond to the motion of an excited electron in the potential field of all N electrons rather than of N - 1 electrons, as must be the case (Slater, 1963). Hunt and Goddard (HG) (1963) have proposed modifying the Hartree-Fock operator in such a way that it would be possible to describe the motion of an excited electron in the potential VN 1 ... 

A restricted Hartree-Fock calculation on a closed-shell n-electron system using a basis set of N orbitals will produce n/2 doubly-occupied molecular orbitals and N—nj2 vacant or virtual orbitals. In a standard Cl calculation, the excited-state determinants are formed by systematically promoting electrons from the occupied orbitals of the ground-state determinant to the vacant or virtual orbitals. The number of configurations which can be formed in this way from N electrons and n basis functions178 is of the order of nN. Thus, even with today s high speed computers, a full Cl is possible only for very small systems. 

There is another physical phenomenon which appears at the correlated level which is completely absent in Hartree-Fock calculations. The transient fluctuations in electron density of one molecule which cause a momentary polarization of the other are typically referred to as London forces. Such forces can be associated with the excitation of one or more electrons in molecule A from occupied to vacant molecular orbitals (polarization of A), coupled with a like excitation of electrons in B within the B MOs. Such multiple excitations appear in correlated calculations their energetic consequence is typically labeled as dispersion energy. Dispersion first appears in double excitations where one electron is excited within A and one within B, but higher order excitations are also possible. As a result, all the dispersion is not encompassed by correlated calculations which terminate with double excitations, but there are higher-order pieces of dispersion present at all levels of excitation. Although dispersion is not necessarily a dominating contributor to H-bonds, this force must be considered to achieve quantitative accuracy. Moreover, dispersion can be particularly important to geometries that are of competitive stability to H-bonds, for example in the case of stacked versus H-bonded DNA base pairs. ... 

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