Electron pairing in dilute liquid metal-metal halide solutions

Abstract

Spin density functional theory is used to describe the interaction between solvated electrons in KCl in the high dilution limit. In agreement with recent calculations based on the path integral method our results for antiparallel spin predict a strong tendency to form localized bielectronic complexes. At variance with numerical path integral, our method can efficiently treat the case of parallel spins. For this case we find that electrons repel each other and localize into separate F-center-like states.