Many-electron atoms self-consistent field

We have just explained that the wave equation for the helium atom cannot be solved exacdy because of the term involving l/r12. If the repulsion between two electrons prevents a wave equation from being solved, it should be clear that when there are more than two electrons the situation is worse. If there are three electrons present (as in the lithium atom) there will be repulsion terms involving l/r12, l/r13, and l/r23. Although there are a number of types of calculations that can be performed (particularly the self-consistent field calculations), they will not be described here. Fortunately, for some situations, it is not necessary to have an exact wave function that is obtained from the exact solution of a wave equation. In many cases, an approximate wave function is sufficient. The most commonly used approximate wave functions for one electron are those given by J. C. Slater, and they are known as Slater wave functions or Slater-type orbitals (usually referred to as STO orbitals). 

Although Dirac s equation does not directly admit of a completely self-consistent single-particle interpretation, such an interpretation is physically acceptable and of practical use, provided the potential varies little over distances of the order of the Compton wavelength (h/mc) of the particle in question. It allows, for instance, first-order relativistic corrections to the spectrum of the hydrogen atom and to the core-level densities of many-electron atoms. The latter aspect is of special chemical importance. The required calculations are invariably numerical in nature and this eliminates the need to investigate central-field solutions in the same detail as for Schrodinger s equation. A brief outline suffices. 

Garza, J., Vargas, R. and Vela, A. 1988. Numerical self-consistent-field method to solve the Kohn-Sham equations in confined many-electron atoms. Phys. Rev. E. 58 3949-54. 

About the same time, Douglas Hartree, along with other members of the informal club for theoretical physics at Cambridge University called the Del-Squared Club, began studying approximate methods to describe many-electron atoms. Hartree developed the method of the self-consistent field, which was improved by Vladimir Fock and Slater in early 1930, so as to incorporate the Pauli principle ab initio.37 Dirac, another Del-Squared member, published a paper in 1929 which focused on the exchange interaction of identical particles. This work became part of what soon became called the Heisenberg-Dirac approach.38... 

Semiempirical methods are widely used, based on zero differential overlap (ZDO) approximations which assume that the products of two different basis functions for the same electron, related to different atoms, are equal to zero [21]. The use of semiempirical methods, like MNDO, ZINDO, etc., reduces the calculations to about integrals. This approach, however, causes certain errors that should be compensated by assigning empirical parameters to the integrals. The limited sets of parameters available, in particular for transition metals, make the semiempirical methods of limited use. Moreover, for TM systems the self-consistent field (SCF) procedures are hardly convergent because atoms with partly filled d shells have many... 

Now we have written down a wave function appropriate for use in the case where H = h(i). In HF theory, we make some simplifications so many-electron atoms and molecules can be treated this way. By tacitly assuming that each electron moves in a percieved electric field generated by the stationary nuclei and the average spatial distribution of all the other electrons, it essentially becomes an independant-electron problem. The HF Self Consistent Field procedure (SCF) will be bent on constructing each x(x) to give the lowest energy. 

Thus, the state of each electron in a many-electron atom is conditioned by the Coulomb field of the nucleus and the screening field of the charges of the other electrons. The latter field depends essentially on the states of these electrons, therefore the problem of finding the form of this central field must be coordinated with the determination of the wave functions of these electrons. The most efficient way to achieve this goal is to make use of one of the modifications of the Hartree-Fock self-consistent field method. This problem is discussed in more detail in Chapter 28. 

The starting point of the creation of the theory of the many-electron atom was the idea of Niels Bohr [1] to consider each electron of an atom as orbiting in a stationary state in the field, created by the charge of the nucleus and the rest of the electrons of an atom. This idea is several years older than quantum mechanics itself. It allows one to construct an approximate wave function of the whole atom with the help of one-electron wave functions. They may be found by accounting for the approximate states of the passive electrons, in other words, the states of all electrons must be consistent. This is the essence of the self-consistent field approximation (Hartree-Fock method), widely used in the theory of many-body systems, particularly of many-electron atoms and ions. There are many methods of accounting more or less accurately for this consistency, usually named by correlation effects, and of obtaining more accurate theoretical data on atomic structure. 

Analytic, exact solutions cannot be obtained except for the simplest systems, i.e. hydrogen-like atoms with just one electron and one nucleus. Good approximate solutions can be found by means of the self-consistent field (SCF) method, the details of which need not concern us. If all the electrons have been explicitly considered in the Hamiltonian, the wave functions V, will be many-electron functions V, will contain the coordinates of all the electrons, and a complete electron density map can be obtained by plotting Vf. The associated energies E, are the energy states of the molecule (see Section 2.6) the lowest will be the ground state , and the calculated energy differences En — El should match the spectroscopic transitions in the electronic spectrum. 

The scientific interests of Huzinaga are numerous. He initially worked in the area of solid-state theory. Soon, however, he became interested in the electronic structure of molecules. He studied the one-center expansion of the molecular wavefunction, developed a formalism for the evaluation of atomic and molecular electron repulsion integrals, expanded Roothaan s self-consistent field theory for open-shell systems, and, building on his own work on the separability of many-electron systems, designed a valence electron method for computational studies on large molecules. 

Although wave equations are readily composed for more-electron atoms, they are impossible to solve in closed form. Approximate solutions for many-electron atoms are all based on the assumption that the same set of hydrogen-atom quantum numbers regulates their electronic configurations, subject to the effects of interelectronic repulsions. The wave functions are likewise assumed to be hydrogen-like, but modified by the increased nuclear charge. The method of solution is known as the self-consistent-field procedure. 

Many of the principles and techniques for calculations on atoms, described in section 6.2 of this chapter, can be applied to molecules. In atoms the electronic wave function was written as a determinant of one-electron atomic orbitals which contain the electrons these atomic orbitals could be represented by a range of different analytical expressions. We showed how the Hartree-Fock self-consistent-field methods could be applied to calculate the single determinantal best energy, and how configuration interaction calculations of the mixing of different determinantal wave functions could be performed to calculate the correlation energy. We will now see that these technques can be applied to the calculation of molecular wave functions, the atomic orbitals of section 6.2 being replaced by one-electron molecular orbitals, constructed as linear combinations of atomic orbitals (l.c.a.o. method). 

The dimers of Be, Mg and Ca are very weakly bound by the electron correlation effects, at the self-consistent field (SCF) level they are not stable. The binding energy of alkaline earth dimers is only 2-4 times larger than that in Kr2 and Xe2 dimers. Thus, alkaline dimers can be attributed to the van der Waals molecules. The situation is changed in many-atom clusters, even in trimers (Table II). This is evidently a manifestation of the many-body effects. The crucial role of the 3-body forces in the stabilization of the Be clusters was revealed at the SCF level previously [3-5], and more recently was established at the Mpller-Plesset perturbation theory level up to the fourth order (MP4) [6,7]. The study of binding in the Ben clusters [8-10] reveals that the 3-body exchange forces are attractive and give an important contribution to... 

Highly-ionized atoms DHF calculations on isoelectronic sequences of few-electron ions serve as the starting point of fundamental studies of physical phenomena, though many-body corrections are now applied routinely using relativistic many-body theory. Relativistic self-consistent field studies are used as the basis of investigations of systematic trends in ionization energies [137-144], radiative transition probabilities [145-148], and quantum electrodynamic corrections [149-151] in few-electron systems. Increased experimental precision in these areas has driven the development of many-body methods to model the electron correlation effects, and the inclusion of Breit interaction in the evaluation of both one-body and many-body corrections. 

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