Near-Exact Non-relativistic Energies for Many-Electron Atoms

Abstract

Electron-electron interactions and correlations form the basis of difficulties encountered in the theoretical solution of problems dealing with multi-electron systems. Accurate treatment of the electron-electron problem is likely to unravel some nice physical properties of matter embedded in the interaction. In an effort to tackle this many-body problem, an ”exact” form of a symmetrydependent pseudopotential for an n-electron atom is suggested in this study. The non-relativistic groundstate ionization potentials for atoms with up to 103 electrons generated using this pseudopotential are in good agreement with the existing experimental data. The symmetry dependence in the proposed pseudopotential hinges on a unique partition function specific to a system. An empirically determined partition function used to generate results for the atoms in this study is also presented. We have also calculated explicitly the exchange correlation energy and predicted cases where it is negative, zero, and positive for the various groundstate energy configurations of atoms. The major limitation in the suggested method is its inability to incorporate spin polarization effects which is likely to enhance agreement with experimental results as already observed in DFT calculations.