Natural orbitals NO

Anotiier way of justifying the use of eq. (6.4) for calculating tire kinetic energy is by reference to natural orbitals (eigenvectors of the density matrix. Section 9.5). The exact kinetic energy can be calculated from the natural orbitals (NO) arising from tire exact density matrix. 

The spin-free one-particle density matrix Fi = F is diagonal in the basis of the (spin-free) natural orbitals (NOs)... 

The major advantage of a 1-RDM formulation is that the kinetic energy is explicitly defined and does not require the construction of a functional. The unknown functional in a D-based theory only needs to incorporate electron correlation. It does not rely on the concept of a fictitious noninteracting system. Consequently, the scheme is not expected to suffer from the above mentioned limitations of KS methods. In fact, the correlation energy in 1-RDM theory scales homogeneously in contrast to the scaling properties of the correlation term in DPT [14]. Moreover, the 1-RDM completely determines the natural orbitals (NOs) and their occupation numbers (ONs). Accordingly, the functional incorporates fractional ONs in a natural way, which should provide a correct description of both dynamical and nondynamical correlation. 

It can be necessary and/or desirable to impose symmetry and equivalence restrictions on quantum chemical calculations or results beyond the single-configuration SCF level. For instance, most Cl programs generate natural orbitals (NOs) after computing the Cl wave function, by forming and diagonalizing the first-order reduced density matrix or 1-matrix p in... 

The GVB results are normally presented in the form of an MO—Cl wave function (recall Section 9.2.1), that is a linear combination of MO-based configurations constructed with natural orbitals (NOs), as in Equation 10.1 ... 

As in all perturbational approaches, the Hamiltonian is divided into an unperturbed part and a perturbation V. The operator is a spin-free, one-component Hamiltonian and the spin-orbit coupling operator takes the role of the perturbation. There is no natural perturbation parameter X in this particular case. Instead, J4 so is assumed to represent a first-order perturbation The perturbational treatment of fine structure is an inherent two-step approach. It starts with the computation of correlated wave functions and energies for pure spin states—mostly at the Cl level. In a second step, spin-orbit perturbed energies and wavefunctions are determined. 

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