Slater determinant energy

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. 

In accordance with the variation theorem we require the set of coefficients that gives the lowest-energy wavefunction, and some scheme for changing the coefficients to derive that wavefunction. For a given basis set and a given functional form of the wavefunction (i.e. a Slater determinant) the best set of coefficients is that for which the energy is a minimum, at which point... 

Equation (3.74) is the exact exchange energy (obtained from the Slater determinant the Kohn-Sham orbitals), is the exchange energy under the local spin densit) ... 

One more quantum number, that relating to the inversion (i) symmetry operator ean be used in atomie eases beeause the total potential energy V is unehanged when all of the eleetrons have their position veetors subjeeted to inversion (i r = -r). This quantum number is straightforward to determine. Beeause eaeh L, S, Ml, Ms, H state diseussed above eonsist of a few (or, in the ease of eonfiguration interaetion several) symmetry adapted eombinations of Slater determinant funetions, the effeet of the inversion operator on sueh a wavefunetion P ean be determined by ... 

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. 

This partieular Hamiltonian, when aeting on any Slater determinant formed by plaeing N eleetrons into the SCF spin-orbitals, yields a zeroth order eigenvalue equal to the sum of the orbital energies of the spin-orbitals appearing in that determinant ... 

I will refer to the Hartree model from time to time in the text. Hartree s energies were in poor agreement with experiment. With the benefit of hindsight he should have allowed for indistinguishability and the Pauli principle. This was Fock s contribution to the field he wrote the wavefunction as what we would now recognize as a Slater determinant. Such a wavefunction automatically satisfies the Pauli principle. 

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... 

So far there have not been any restrictions on the MOs used to build the determinantal trial wave function. The Slater determinant has been written in terms of spinorbitals, eq. (3.20), being products of a spatial orbital times a spin function (a or /3). If there are no restrictions on the form of the spatial orbitals, the trial function is an Unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) wave function. The term Different Orbitals for Different Spins (DODS) is also sometimes used. If the interest is in systems with an even number of electrons and a singlet type of wave function (a closed shell system), the restriction that each spatial orbital should have two electrons, one with a and one with /3 spin, is normally made. Such wave functions are known as Restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF). Open-shell systems may also be described by restricted type wave functions, where the spatial part of the doubly occupied orbitals is forced to be the same this is known as Restricted Open-shell Hartree-Fock (ROHF). For open-shell species a UHF treatment leads to well-defined orbital energies, which may be interpreted as ionization potentials. Section 3.4. For an ROHF wave function it is not possible to chose a unitary transformation which makes the matrix of Lagrange multipliers in eq. (3.40) diagonal, and orbital energies from an ROHF wave function are consequently not uniquely defined, and cannot be equated to ionization potentials by a Koopman type argument. 

This is perhaps the easiest method to understand. It is based on the variational principle (Appendix B), analogous to the HF method. The trial wave function is written as a linear combination of determinants with the expansion coefficients determined by requiring that the energy should be a minimum (or at least stationary), a procedure known as Configuration Interaction (Cl). The MOs used for building the excited Slater determinants are taken from a Hartree-Fock calculation and held fixed. Subscripts S, D, T etc. indicate determinants which are singly, doubly, triply etc. excited relative to the... 

In developing perturbation theory it was assumed that the solutions to the unpermrbed problem formed a complete set. This is general means that there must be an infinite number of functions, which is impossible in actual calculations. The lowest energy solution to the unperturbed problem is the HF wave function, additional higher energy solutions are excited Slater determinants, analogously to the Cl method. When a finite basis set is employed it is only possible to generate a finite number of excited determinants. The expansion of the many-electron wave function is therefore truncated. 

The matrix elements between the HF and a doubly excited state are given by two-electron integrals over MOs (eq. (4.7)). The difference in total energy between two Slater determinants becomes a difference in MO energies (essentially Koopmans theorem), and the explicit formula for the second-order Mpller-Plesset correction is... 

The subscript S denotes tiiat it is the kinetic energy calculated from a Slater determinant. The A = 1 case corresponds to interacting electrons, and eq. (6.4) is therefore only an approximation to the real kinetic energy, but a substantial improvement over the TF formula (eq. (6.2)). 

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). 

The energy of a wave function containing variational parameters, like an HF (one Slater determinant) or MCSCF (many Slater determinants) wave function. Parameters are typically the MO and state coefficients, but may also be for example basis function exponents. Usually only minima are desired, although in some cases saddle points may also be of interest (excited states). 

Kinetic energy functional, calculated from a Slater determinant Internal energy Unitary matrix... 

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,... 

Electronic excitation energies can be approximated by differences between filled and empty orbital energies. Again, however, a more accurate treatment requires a separate calculation for the ground and excited state (represented by two different Slater determinants). 

The total energy associated with the Slater determinant of eq. (1.70) is given by (see Ref. 2)... 

In the Hartree-Fock approach, the many-body wave function in form of a Slater determinant plays the key role in the theory. For instance, the Hartree-Fock equations are derived by minimization of the total energy expressed in terms of this determinantal wave function. In density functional theory (3,4), the fundamental role is taken over by an observable quantity, the electron density. An important theorem of density functional theory states that the correct ground state density, n(r), determines rigorously all electronic properties of the system, in particular its total energy. The totd energy of a system can be expressed as a functional of the density n (r) and this functional, E[n (r)], is minimized by the ground state density. 

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