Nicola Gaston

Convergence of the ab initio many-body expansion for the cohesive energy of solid mercury

A many-body expansion for mercury clusters of the form E = sum_{i<j}Delta epsilon_{ij} + sum_{i<j<k}Delta epsilon_{ijk} + ... quad, does not converge smoothly with increasing cluster size towards the solid state. Even for smaller cluster sizes (up to n=6), where van der Waals forces still dominate, one observes bad convergence behaviour. For solid mercury the convergence of the many-body expansion can dramatically be improved by an incremental procedure within an embedded cluster approach. Here one adds the coupled cluster many-body electron correlation contributions of the embedded cluster to the bulk HF energy. In this way we obtain a cohesive energy (not corrected for zero-point vibration) of 0.79 eV in perfect agreement with the experimental value.

Embedding procedure for ab initio correlation calculations in group II metals

In order to apply ab initio wave-function-based correlation methods to metals, it is desirable to split the calculation into a mean-field part and a correlation part. Whereas the mean-field part (here Hartree-Fock) is performed in the extended periodic system, it is necessary to use for the correlation part local wave-function-based correlation methods in finite fragments of the solid. For these finite entities it is necessary to construct an embedding. The authors suggest an embedding scheme which has itself no metallic character but can mimic the metal in the internal region, where the atoms are correlated. With this embedding it is also possible to localize the metallic orbitals in the central part. The long-range nonadditive contributions of metallicity and correlation are treated with the method of increments. In this paper they present different ways to construct such an embedding and discuss the influence of the embedding on the correlation energy of the solid.

The frequency-dependent dipole polarizability of the mercury dimer from four-component relativistic density-functional theory.

The frequency-dependent dipole polarizability of Hg(2) is calculated using response theory within four-component relativistic density-functional theory [using the local-density approximation (LDA) and the hybrid functional B3LYP] including corrections for the basis-set superposition error. The anisotropic component of the polarizability tensor agrees well with the values obtained from collision-induced Raman spectroscopy carried out at a wavelength of 488 nm. The values obtained from the two density functionals agree closely with the experimentally derived anisotropy component of the dipole polarizability, despite their rather large differences in the dimer potential-energy curves (LDA is strongly overbinding while B3LYP is purely repulsive). The first two refractivity virial coefficients for the generalized Clausius-Mossotti function are derived.