Unrestricted determinants energy

In spite of spin contamination, an unrestricted determinant is often used as a first approximation to the wave function for doublets and triplets because unrestricted wave functions have lower energies than the corresponding restricted wave functions. 

The next step concerns the calculation of the energy of a collection of spin unrestricted determinants with different occupations and relate their energies to the electronic structure parameters in order to calculate the X parameter and in this way obtain a measure for the biquadratic interaction strength from methods like DFT (Fig. 5.17). 

The Spin Projection approach can be generalized to any spin system. The energy of any intermediate spin state S can be expressed as a function of the energy of the higher multeplicity spin state as and of an unrestricted determinant corresponding to Mg = S, E(Mg) as ... 

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. 

Much of the development of the previous chapter pertains to the use of a single Slater determinant trial wavefunction. As presented, it relates to what has been called the unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) theory in which each spin-orbital (ftj has its own orbital energy 8i and LCAO-MO coefficients Cv,i there may be different Cv,i for a spin-orbitals than for (3 spin-orbitals. Such a wavefunction suffers from the spin contamination difficulty detailed earlier. 

Due to the spin polarization effect, the magnetic orbitals can be difficult to identify from a spin-unrestricted calculation. Since the total energy of a Kohn—Sham determinant is invariant under unitary transformations between the spin-up orbitals among each other and spin-down orbitals among each other, one can arrange each spin-up orbital to overlap at most with each spin-down orbital on the basis of the corresponding orbital transformation (COT) (88—90). Then, the molecular orbitals (MOs) are ordered into pairs of maximum similarity between spin-up and spin-down orbitals and can be separated into three groups (i) the MOs with spatial overlap close to one (doubly occupied MOs),... 

For our SCF calculation the way to obtain such a solution is to optimize the orbitals not for the energy of determinant 7.6, but for the average energy of both determinants. This is termed the imposition of symmetry and equivalence restrictions. It involves imposing a constraint on a variational calculation, and consequently the symmetry and equivalence restricted solution will have an energy no lower than the broken symmetry solution it will usually have a higher energy. We may note that in a UHF calculation we impose neither spin nor spatial symmetry and equivalence restrictions — the -terms restricted and unrestricted were first used in exactly this context of whether to impose symmetry constraints on the wave function. 

When the second of the equivalence restrictions is removed, a single determinant wavefunction of lower energy is usually obtained. In fact, it is possible for a wave-function obtained in this way, a so-called unrestricted Hartree-Fock (UHF) wavefunction191 (perhaps more properly called a spin-unrestricted Hartree-Fock wavefunction) to go beyond the Hartree-Fock approximation and thus include some of the correlation energy. Lowdin192 describes this as a method for introducing a Coulomb hole to supplement the Fermi hole already accounted for in the RHF wavefunction. 

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