Single Slater determinant

To this pom t, th e basic approxmi alien is th at th e total wave I lnic-tion IS a single Slater determinant and the resultant expression of the molecular orbitals is a linear combination of atomic orbital basis functions (MO-LCAO). In other words, an ah miiio calculation can be initiated once a basis for the LCAO is chosen. Mathematically, any set of functions can be a basis for an ah mitio calculation. However, there are two main things to be considered m the choice of the basis. First one desires to use the most efficient and accurate functions possible, so that the expansion (equation (49) on page 222). will require the few esl possible term s for an accurate representation of a molecular orbital. The second one is the speed of tW O-electron integral calculation. 

Ihe one-electron orbitals are commonly called basis functions and often correspond to he atomic orbitals. We will label the basis functions with the Greek letters n, v, A and a. n the case of Equation (2.144) there are K basis functions and we should therefore xpect to derive a total of K molecular orbitals (although not all of these will necessarily 3e occupied by electrons). The smallest number of basis functions for a molecular system vill be that which can just accommodate all the electrons in the molecule. More sophisti- ated calculations use more basis functions than a minimal set. At the Hartree-Fock limit he energy of the system can be reduced no further by the addition of any more basis unctions however, it may be possible to lower the energy below the Hartree-Fock limit ay using a functional form of the wavefunction that is more extensive than the single Slater determinant. 

The spin- and spatial- symmetry adapted N-eleetron funetions referred to as CSFs ean be formed from one or more Slater determinants. For example, to deseribe the singlet CSF eorresponding to the elosed-shell orbital oeeupaney, a single Slater determinant... 

Also, the Ms = 1 eomponent of the triplet state having aa orbital oeeupaney ean be written as a single Slater determinant ... 

The single Slater determinant wavefunction (properly spin and symmetry adapted) is the starting point of the most common mean field potential. It is also the origin of the molecular orbital concept. 

The simplest trial funetion of the form given above is the single Slater determinant funetion ... 

Much of the development of the previous ehapter pertains to the use of a single Slater determinant trial wavefunetion. As presented, it relates to what has been ealled the unrestrieted Hartree-Foek (UHF) theory in whieh eaeh spin-orbital (jti has its own orbital energy 8i and LCAO-MO eoeffieients Cy,i there may be different Cy,i for a spin-orbitals than for P spin-orbitals. Sueh a wavefunetion suffers from the spin eontamination diffieulty detailed earlier. 

I don t mean that such a wavefunction is necessarily very accurate you saw a minute ago that the LCAO treatment of dihydrogen is rather poor. I mean that, in principle, a Slater determinant has the correct spatial and spin symmetry to represent an electronic state. It very often happens that we have to take combinations of Slater determinants in order to make progress for example, the first excited states of dihydrogen caimot be represented adequately by a single Slater determinant such as... 

So, we have learned that a single Slater determinant can adequately describe some electronic configurations, but others can only be described by a linear combination of Slater determinants, even at the lowest level of accuracy. 

The remarkable thing is that the HF model is so reliable for the calculation of very many molecular properties, as 1 will discuss in Chapters 16 and 17. But for many simple applications, a more advanced treatment of electron correlation is essential and in any case there are very many examples of spectroscopic states that caimot be represented as a single Slater determinant (and so cannot be treated using the standard HF model). In addition, the HF model can only treat the lowest-energy state of any given symmetry. 

In Chapter 6, I discussed the open-shell HF-LCAO model. 1 considered the simple case where we had ti doubly occupied orbitals and 2 orbitals all singly occupied by parallel spin electrons. The ground-state wavefunction was a single Slater determinant. I explained that it was possible to derive an expression for the electronic energy... 

The variational problem is to minimize the energy of a single Slater determinant by choosing suitable values for the MO coefficients, under the constraint that the MOs remain orthonormal. With cj) being an MO written as a linear combination of the basis functions (atomic orbitals) /, this leads to a set of secular equations, F being the Fock matrix, S the overlap matrix and C containing the MO coefficients (Section 3.5). 

A single Slater determinant with N+ N represents a pure spin state if, and only if, the number of doubly filled orbitals defined by Eq. 11.57 equals AL. 

We note that the virial theorem is automatically fulfilled in the Hartree-Fock approximation. This result follows from the fact that the single Slater determinant (Eq. 11.38) built up from the Hartree-Fock functions pk x) satisfying Eq. 11.46 is the optimum wave function of this particular form, and, since this wave function cannot be further improved by scaling, the virial theorem must be fulfilled from the very beginning. If we consider a stationary state with the nuclei in their equilibrium positions, we have particularly Thf = — Fhf, and for the correlation terms follows consequently that... 

In the ordinary Hartree-Fock scheme, the total wave function is approximated by a single Slater determinant and, if the system possesses certain symmetry properties, they may impose rather severe restrictions on the occupied spin orbitals see, e.g., Eq. 11.61. These restrictions may be removed and the total energy correspondingly decreased, if instead we approximate the total wave function by means of the first term in the symmetry adapted set, i.e., by the projection of a single determinant. Since in both cases,... 

It is now possible to formulate an extension of the conventional Hartree-Fock scheme by considering a wave function (25+1) IP which is a pure spin state and which is simply defined by the component of the single Slater determinant Eq. III. 133 as has the spin property required ... 

Molecular rearrangement resulting from molecular collisions or excitation by light can be described with time-dependent many-electron density operators. The initial density operator can be constructed from the collection of initially (or asymptotically) accessible electronic states, with populations wj. In many cases these states can be chosen as single Slater determinants formed from a set of orthonormal molecular spin orbitals (MSOs) im as / =... 

Here we derive the conditions of orbital phase for the cyclic orbital interactions. The A B delocalization is expressed by the interaction between the ground configuration C Q and the electron-transferred configuration tBp(A B) (Scheme 3). A pair of electrons occupies each bonding orbital in which is expressed by a single Slater determinant 0 ... 

The connection to HF theory has been accomplished in a rather ingenious way by Kohn and Sham (KS) by referring to a fictitious reference system of noninteracting electrons. Such a system is evidently exactly described by a single Slater determinant but, in the KS method, is constrained to share the same electron density with the real interacting system. It is then straightforward to show that the orbitals of the fictitious system fulfil equations that very much resemble the HF equations ... 

An important consequence of the only approximate treatment of the electron-electron repulsion is that the true wave function of a many electron system is never a single Slater determinant We may ask now if SD is not the exact wave function of N interacting electrons, is there any other (necessarily artificial model) system of which it is the correct wave function The answer is Yes it can easily be shown that a Slater determinant is indeed an eigenfunction of a Hamilton operator defined as the sum of the Fock operators of equation (1-25)... 

To understand how Kohn and Sham tackled this problem, we go back to the discussion of the Hartree-Fock scheme in Chapter 1. There, our wave function was a single Slater determinant SD constructed from N spin orbitals. While the Slater determinant enters the HF method as the approximation to the true N-electron wave function, we showed in Section 1.3 that 4>sd can also be looked upon as the exact wave function of a fictitious system of N non-interacting electrons (that is electrons which behave as uncharged fermions and therefore do not interact with each other via Coulomb repulsion), moving in the elfective potential VHF. For this type of wave function the kinetic energy can be exactly expressed as... 

Mean-field approximation of quasi-free electrons (the Hartree-Fock approximation). The total wave function is described, in this case, by a single Slater determinant. 

The individual J,Mj) multiplets cannot be, in principle, described by a single Slater determinant. This is a consequence of the general rules of coupling of two angular momenta eigenfunctions of all projections of the total angular momentum which is lower than the maximal possible (L + S), are represented as linear combinations of several determinants [36]. 

Then, J = S and the ground state wave function is adequately described by a single Slater determinant, that is, DFT methods may work. 

While in principle all of the methods discussed here are Hartree-Fock, that name is commonly reserved for specific techniques that are based on quantum-chemical approaches and involve a finite cluster of atoms. Typically one uses a standard technique such as GAUSSIAN-82 (Binkley et al., 1982). In its simplest form GAUSSIAN-82 utilizes single Slater determinants. A basis set of LCAO-MOs is used, which for computational purposes is expanded in Gaussian orbitals about each atom. Exchange and Coulomb integrals are treated exactly. In practice the quality of the atomic basis sets may be varied, in some cases even including d-type orbitals. Core states are included explicitly in these calculations. 

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