Slater determinant singly

In practice, each CSF is a Slater determinant of molecular orbitals, which are divided into three types inactive (doubly occupied), virtual (unoccupied), and active (variable occupancy). The active orbitals are used to build up the various CSFs, and so introduce flexibility into the wave function by including configurations that can describe different situations. Approximate electronic-state wave functions are then provided by the eigenfunctions of the electronic Flamiltonian in the CSF basis. This contrasts to standard FIF theory in which only a single determinant is used, without active orbitals. The use of CSFs, gives the MCSCF wave function a structure that can be interpreted using chemical pictures of electronic configurations [229]. An interpretation in terms of valence bond sti uctures has also been developed, which is very useful for description of a chemical process (see the appendix in [230] and references cited therein). 

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. 

For any sizeable system the Slater determinant can be tedious to write out, let alone the equivalent full orbital expansion, and so it is common to use a shorthand notation. Various notation systems have been devised. In one system the terms along the diagonal of the matrix are written as a single-row determinant. For the 3x3 determinant we therefore have ... 

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. 

Don t confuse the state wavefunction with a molecular orbital we might well want to build the state wavefunction, which describes all the 16 electrons, from molecular orbitals each of which describe a single electron. But the two are not the same. We would have to find some suitable one-electron wavefunctions and then combine them into a slater determinant in order to take account of 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 my discussion of pyridine, I took a combination of these determinants that had the correct singlet spin symmetry (that is, the combination that represented a singlet state). I could equally well have concentrated on the triplet states. In modem Cl calculations, we simply use all the raw Slater determinants. Such single determinants by themselves are not necessarily spin eigenfunctions, but provided we include them all we will get correct spin eigenfunctions on diago-nalization of the Hamiltonian matrix. 

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... 

How are the additional determinants beyond the HF constructed With N electrons and M basis functions, solution of the Roothaan-Hall equations for the RHF case will yield N/2 occupied MOs and M — N/2 unoccupied (virtual) MOs. Except for a minimum basis, there will always be more virtual than occupied MOs. A Slater detemfinant is determined by N/2 spatial MOs multiplied by two spin functions to yield N spinorbitals. By replacing MOs which are occupied in the HF determinant by MOs which are unoccupied, a whole series of determinants may be generated. These can be denoted according to how many occupied HF MOs have been replaced by unoccupied MOs, i.e. Slater determinants which are singly, doubly, triply, quadruply etc. excited relative to the HF determinant, up to a maximum of N excited electrons. These... 

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... 

Since the singly excited determinants effectively relax the orbitals in a CCSD calculation, non-canonical HF orbitals can also be used in coupled cluster methods. This allows for example the use of open-shell singlet states (which require two Slater determinants) as reference for a coupled cluster calculation. 

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 ... 

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