Many-body Dirac-Fock method

The all-orders relativistic many-body perturbation theory approach [82], [83], the combination of this approach with the multiconfiguration Dirac - Fock method [84] or the relativistic coupled-cluster approach [85] allow for the evaluation of the energy levels for valence electrons with accuracy of the order of... 

From a very general point of view every ion-atom collision system has to be treated as a correlated many-body time-dependent quantum system. To solve this from an ab initio point of view is still impossible. So, one has to rely on various approximations. Nowadays the best method which can be applied to realistic collision systems (which we discuss here) is on the level of the non-selfconsistent time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Slater or, in the relativistic case, the Dirac-Fock-Slater method. Up-to-now no correlation beyond this approximation can be taken into account in the case of 3 or more electrons. (This is in accordance with the definition of correlation given by Lowdin [1] in 1956) In addition no QED contributions, i.e. no correction to the 1/r Coulomb interaction between the electrons, ever have been taken into account, although in very heavy collision systems this effect may become important. This will be discussed in section 5. A short survey of the theory used is followed by our results on impact parameter dependent electron transfer and excitation calculations of ion-atom and ion-solid collisions as well as first results of an ab initio calculation of MO X-rays in such complicated many particle scattering systems. 

Z.W. Liu and H.P Kelly, Atomic many-body perturbation method based on mnlticonfiguration Dirac-Fock wave functions, Phys. Rev. A 43, 3305 (1991). 

---