Core polarisation and relativistic effects in the alkali atoms

Abstract

A method in which both the relativistic and core polarisation effects are treated in a uniform way within the Hartree-Fock computational scheme is presented. The method retains the simplicity of the standard Hartree-Fock formulation since only the potential function is modified by adding effective relativistic and polarisation potentials defined in earlier works. Calculations of the transition energies, fine-structure splittings and oscillator strengths in the alkali atoms are performed. The results indicate that the simple model describes with great accuracy both the relativistic and correlation effects and that it may be used to obtain a reliable description of the atomic spectra.