Wave spin contamination

Another way of constructing wave functions for open-shell molecules is the restricted open shell Hartree-Fock method (ROHF). In this method, the paired electrons share the same spatial orbital thus, there is no spin contamination. The ROHF technique is more difficult to implement than UHF and may require slightly more CPU time to execute. ROHF is primarily used for cases where spin contamination is large using UHF. 

The advantage of unrestricted calculations is that they can be performed very efficiently. The alpha and beta orbitals should be slightly different, an effect called spin polarization. The disadvantage is that the wave function is no longer an eigenfunction of the total spin <(5 >. Thus, some error may be introduced into the calculation. This error is called spin contamination and it can be considered as having too much spin polarization. 

Unrestricted calculations often incorporate a spin annihilation step, which removes a large percentage of the spin contamination from the wave function. This helps minimize spin contamination but does not completely prevent it. The final value of (,S y is always the best check on the amount of spin contamination present. In the Gaussian program, the option iop(5/14=2) tells the program to use the annihilated wave function to produce the population analysis. 

When it has been shown that the errors introduced by spin contamination are unacceptable, restricted open-shell calculations are often the best way to obtain a reliable wave function. 

Another approach is to run an unrestricted calculation and then project out the spin contamination after the wave function has been obtained (PUHF, PMP2). This gives a correction to the energy but does not affect the wave function. Spin projection nearly always improves ah initio results, but may seriously harm the accuracy of DFT results. 

A similar effect is obtained by using the spin-constrained UHF method (SUHF). In this method, the spin contamination error in a UHF wave function is constrained by the use of a Lagrangian multiplier. This removes the spin contamination completely as the multiplier goes to infinity. In practice, small positive values remove most of the spin contamination. 

Semiempirical programs often use the half-electron approximation for radical calculations. The half-electron method is a mathematical technique for treating a singly occupied orbital in an RHF calculation. This results in consistent total energy at the expense of having an approximate wave function and orbital energies. Since a single-determinant calculation is used, there is no spin contamination. 

If spin contamination is small, continue to use unrestricted methods, preferably with spin-annihilated wave functions and spin projected energies. Do not use spin projection with DFT methods. When the amount of spin contamination is more significant, use restricted open-shell methods. If all else fails, use highly correlated methods. 

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 optimum value of c is determined by the variational principle. If c = 1, the UHF wave function is identical to RHF. This will normally be the case near the equilibrium distance. As the bond is stretched, the UHF wave function allows each of the electrons to localize on a nucleus c goes towards 0. The point where the RHF and UHF descriptions start to differ is often referred to as the RHF/UHF instability point. This is an example of symmetry breaking, as discussed in Section 3.8.3. The UHF wave function correctly dissociates into two hydrogen atoms, however, the symmetry breaking of the MOs has two other, closely connected, consequences introduction of electron correlation and spin contamination. To illustrate these concepts, we need to look at the 4 o UHF determinant, and the six RHF determinants in eqs. (4.15) and (4.16) in more detail. We will again ignore all normalization constants. 

Another way of viewing spin contamination is to write the UHF wave function as a linear combination of pure R(0)HF determinants, e.g. for a singlet state. 

The amount of spin contamination is given by the expectation value of die operator, (S ). The theoretical value for a pure spin state is S S + 1), i.e. 0 for a singlet (Sz = 0), 0.75 for a doublet (S = 1/2), 2.00 for a triplet (S = 1) etc. A UHF singlet wave function will contain some amounts of triplet, quintet etc. states, increasing the (S ) value from its theoretical value of zero for a pure spin state. Similarly, a UHF doublet wave function will contain some amounts of quartet, sextet etc. states. Usually the contribution from the next higher spin state from the desired is... 

By including electron correlation in the wave function the UHF method introduces more biradical character into the wave function than RHF. The spin contamination part is also purely biradical in nature, i.e. a UHF treatment in general will overestimate the biradical character. Most singlet states are well described by a closed-shell wave function near the equilibrium geometry, and in those cases it is not possible to generate a UHF solution which has a lower energy than the RHF. There are systems, however, for which this does not hold. An example is the ozone molecule, where two types of resonance structure can be drawn. Figure 4.8. 

From the above it should be clear that UHF wave functions which are spin contaminated (more than a few percent deviation of (S ) from the theoretical value of S S + 1)) have disadvantages. For closed-shell systems an RHF procedure is therefore normally preferred. For open-shell systems, however, the UHF method has been heavily used. It is possible to use an ROHF type wave function for open-shell systems, but this leads to computational procedures which are somewhat more complicated than for the UHF case when electron correlation is introduced. 

Analogously to MP methods, coupled cluster theory may also be based on a UFIF reference wave function. The resulting UCC methods again suffer from spin contamination of the underlying UHF, but the infinite nature of coupled cluster methods is substantially better at reducing spin contamination relative to UMP. Projection methods analogous to those of the PUMP case have been considered but are not commonly used. ROHF based coupled cluster methods have also been proposed, but appear to give results very similar to UCC, especially at the CCSD(T) level. 

The improvement brought about by extending the perturbation series beyond second order is very small when a UHF wave function is used as the reference, i.e. the higher-order terms do very little to reduce the spin contamination. In the dissociation limit the spin contamination is inconsequential, and the MP2, MP3 and MP4 results are all in... 

Just as in the unrestricted Hartree-Fock variant, the Slater determinant constructed from the KS orbitals originating from a spin unrestricted exchange-correlation functional is not a spin eigenfunction. Frequently, the resulting (S2) expectation value is used as a probe for the quality of the UKS scheme, similar to what is usually done within UHF. However, we must be careful not to overstress the apparent parallelism between unrestricted Kohn-Sham and Hartree-Fock in the latter, the Slater determinant is in fact the approximate wave function used. The stronger its spin contamination, the more questionable it certainly gets. In... 

In principle, transition-metal clusters may best be treated with multi-determinant wave-function methods (139), but in practice due to their size often only DFT calculations are feasible and method-inherent errors have to be taken care of, e.g., the problem of spin contamination and the approximate nature of the exchange-correlation functionals available. 

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