Spin-orbit coupling and electron correlation in relativistic configuration interaction and coupled-cluster methods

Abstract

We studied convergence characteristics of relativistic effective core potential (RECP) based configuration interaction (CI) and coupled-cluster (CC) schemes in terms of spin-orbit coupling and electron correlation. The relativistic correlated methods can be divided into Kramers restricted (KR) and spin-orbit (SO) methods which differ by the stage of spin-orbit treatment: the KR method employs two-component Kramers restricted Hartree-Fock (HF) spinors as the one-electron basis in which spin-orbit coupling is included, whereas the SO method is based on one-component molecular orbitals generated from scalar relativistic HF and the spin-orbit interaction is then entered in post-HF step. The KR method is usually superior to the SO method for molecules containing heavy elements since spin-orbit coupling is included from the HF step. A performance calibration of the SO method against the KR method is performed by computations of the ground state energies and equilibrium bond lengths of MH (M = Tl, Pb, Bi, Po, and At). Spin-orbit coupling of each molecule was systematically increased by adjusting the spin-orbit operator of RECP to investigate its impact on the SO method. Although KRCI and SOCI converged to the same full-CI limit, for the strong spin-orbit coupling SOCI required higher levels of correlation compared to KRCI to account for the orbital relaxation effect. SOCC, in contrast, was able to recover both spin-orbit interaction and electron correlation in CC steps regardless of the spin-orbit strength, implying that SOCC could be the reliable and efficient relativistic ab initio method for moderate sized molecules containing heavy elements. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.