Basis set effects on the Hartree–Fock description of confined many-electron atoms

Abstract

In this work, the basis sets designed by Clementi, Bunge and Thakkar, for atomic systems, have been used to obtain the electronic structure of confined many-electron atoms by using Roothaan's approach in the Hartree–Fock context with a new code written in C, which uses the message-passing interface library. The confinement was imposed as Ludeña suggested to simulate walls with infinity potential. For closed-shell atoms, the Thakkar basis set functions give the best total energies (TE) as a function of the confinement radius, obtaining the following ordering: TE(Thakkar) < TE(Bunge) < TE(Clementi). However, for few open-shell atoms this ordering is not preserved and a trend, for the basis sets, is not observed. Although there are differences between the TE predicted by these basis set functions, the corresponding pressures are similar to each other; it means that changes in the total energy are described almost in the same way by using any of these basis sets. By analysing the total energy as a function of the inverse of the volume we propose an equation of state; for regions of small volumes, this equation predicts that the pressure is inversely proportional to the square of the volume.