Many-body interaction energy formalism

II. Many-body interaction energies and correlation contributions in the PT formalism... 

In 1988, Tersoff [7] introduced an analytical expression for a many-body potential energy function based on bond order, which was able to accommodate reactive dynamies in a straightforward manner. In this formalism, the interaction energy Eij between a pair of atoms i and j is given by... 

One formalism which has been extensively used with classical trajectory methods to study gas-phase reactions has been the London-Eyring-Polanyi-Sato (LEPS) method . This is a semiempirical technique for generating potential energy surfaces which incorporates two-body interactions into a valence bond scheme. The combination of interactions for diatomic molecules in this formalism results in a many-body potential which displays correct asymptotic behavior, and which contains barriers for reaction. For the case of a diatomic molecule reacting with a surface, the surface is treated as one body of a three-body reaction, and so the two-body terms are composed of two atom-surface interactions and a gas-phase atom-atom potential. The LEPS formalism then introduces adjustable potential energy barriers into molecule-surface reactions. 

The type of correlated method that has enjoyed the most widespread application to H-bonded systems is many-body perturbation theory, also commonly referred to as Mpller-Plesset (MP) perturbation theory This approach considers the true Hamiltonian as a sum of its Hartree-Fock part plus an operator corresponding to electron correlation. In other words, the unperturbed Hamiltonian consists of the interaction of the electrons with the nuclei, plus their kinetic energy, to which is added the Hartree-Fock potential the interaction of each electron with the time-averaged field generated by the others. The perturbation thus becomes the difference between the correct interelectronic repulsion operator, with its instantaneous correlation between electrons, and the latter Hartree-Fock potential. In this formalism, the Hartree-Fock energy is equed to the sum of the zeroth and first-order perturbation energy corrections. 

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