Restricted Hartree-Fock method dissociation

The great speed and known properties of RHF calculations are not sufficient justification for a limitation to RHF methods when they are inherently inappropriate. It is worth remarking that most potential-energy surfaces describing reactions, and many describing dissociations are inappropriate for RHF methods. Restricted Hartree-Fock methods are also of limited validity in many situations where two or more surfaces are at nearly the same energy. 

The second approach to treating nondynamical correlation has an air of the ostrich about it ignore the spin symmetry of the wave function and use unrestricted Haxtree-Fock (UHF) theory as the single configuration description [7]. Since the UHF wave function comprises one spin-orbital for each electron, a molecular UHF wave function should dissociate to atomic UHF wave functions, for example. This is certainly not the case for spin-restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) molecules and atoms in general. And there is an attractive simplicity about UHF — no active orbitals to identify, and so forth. However, where nondynamical correlation would be important in an RHF-based treatment, the UHF method will suffer from severe spin-contamination, while where nondynamical correlation is not important the RHF solution may be lower in energy than any broken-symmetry UHF solution, so potential curves and surfaces may have steps or kinks where the spin symmetry is broken in the UHF treatment. 

The electronic structure methods are based primarily on two basic approximations (1) Born-Oppenheimer approximation that separates the nuclear motion from the electronic motion, and (2) Independent Particle approximation that allows one to describe the total electronic wavefunction in the form of one electron wavefunc-tions i.e. a Slater determinant [26], Together with electron spin, this is known as the Hartree-Fock (HF) approximation. The HF method can be of three types restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF), unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) and restricted open Hartree-Fock (ROHF). In the RHF method, which is used for the singlet spin system, the same orbital spatial function is used for both electronic spins (a and (3). In the UHF method, electrons with a and (3 spins have different orbital spatial functions. However, this kind of wavefunction treatment yields an error known as spin contamination. In the case of ROHF method, for an open shell system paired electron spins have the same orbital spatial function. One of the shortcomings of the HF method is neglect of explicit electron correlation. Electron correlation is mainly caused by the instantaneous interaction between electrons which is not treated in an explicit way in the HF method. Therefore, several physical phenomena can not be explained using the HF method, for example, the dissociation of molecules. The deficiency of the HF method (RHF) at the dissociation limit of molecules can be partly overcome in the UHF method. However, for a satisfactory result, a method with electron correlation is necessary. 

There are a number of slightly more approximate methods for determining the electron affinity (EA) based on the restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) and spin-unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) methods. For closed shell anions, molecules which dissociate to... 

Some caution should be exercised in the application of the size consistency concept to open-shell fragments, however. As Taylor has pointed out, a given method may be size consistent for some systems but not for others. For example, the spin-restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) approach is size consistent for the dissociation of the hydrogen fluoride in its n excited state into atoms. 

The Restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) method used to describe the dissociation of the chemical bond gives simply tragic results (cf. Chapter 8, p. 437), qualitatively wrong on the other hand, the Uruestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) method gives a qualitatively correct description. 

All the calculations of F2 are carried out with a simple basis set of double-zeta polarization type, the standard 6-31G(d) basis set, and are performed at a fixed interatomic distance of 1.44 A, which is approximately the optimized distance for a full Cl calculation in this basis set. Only the corresponding orbitals are referred to as the active orbitals , while the orbitals representing the lone pairs, so-called spectator orbitals , remain doubly occupied in all calculations. A common point to the various VB methods we use, except the VBCI method, is that at the dissociation limit, the methods converge to two F fragments at the restricted-open-shell Hartree Fock (ROHF) level. 

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