Spin projection and annihilation technique

Many transition metal systems are open-shell systems. Due to the presence of low-energy excited states, it is very common to experience problems with spin contamination of unrestricted wave functions. Quite often, spin projection and annihilation techniques are not sufficient to correct the large amount of spin contamination. Because of this, restricted open-shell calculations are more reliable than unrestricted calculations for metal system. Spin contamination is discussed in Chapter 27. 

The UHF ansatz is necessary because in case of neutral solitons one has to deal with a doublet state. Thus a DODS (different orbitals for different spins) ansatz, as the UHF one, is necessary to describe the system. However, in the UHF method described so far, one Slater determinant with different spatial orbitals for electrons of different spins is applied, which is not an eigenfunction of S2, i.e. S(S+l)h2. The best way to overcome this difficulty would be to use the PHF (Projected Hartree Fock) method, also called EHF method (Extended Hartree Fock) where before the variation the correct spin eigenfunction is projected out of the DODS ansatz Slater determinant [66,67a]. Unfortunately numerical solution of the rather complicated EHF equations in each time step seems to be too tedious at present. Moreover for large systems the EHF wavefunction approaches the UHF one [68], however, this might be due to the approximations used in [67a]. Another possibility is to apply the projection after the variation using again Lowdin s projection operator [66]. Projection and annihilation techniques were... 

The simplest way to avoid the neglect of spin polarization is to use a spin-unrestricted approach, such as UHF. However, at the UHF level of theory, the spin polarization effects are usually overestimated considerably in magnitude. In the absence of a theoretical framework that includes electron correlation (whereby a significant fraction of the problems discussed above vanish), the excess spin polarization can be reduced considerably by applying spin projection (PUHF) or spin annihilation (UHF-AA) techniques. Still, significant and seemingly unpredictable errors do occur also at this level of approximation, due to spin contamination and lack of electron correlation. These will be discussed in Section 4 below. 

The other area in which projection of an unrestricted result has received attention is projected Mpller-Plesset perturbation theory, the PUMPn methods [31], where n is the order of the perturbation theory. In cases in which the UHF approximation is a poor starting point (considerable spin contamination, for example), the convergence of the MP perturbation expansion can be slow and/or erratic. The PUMP methods apply projection operators to the perturbation expansion, although usually not full projection but simply annihilation of the leading contaminants. This approach has met with mixed success again, it represents a rather expensive modification to a technique that was originally chosen partly for its economy — seldom a recipe for success. 

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