The superiority of the localized, broken symmetry description for ionization from symmetry equivalent core holes and lone pairs in Xα theory is demonstrated by calculations on N 2 (1s) and by analysis of the literature results for O 3, OF 2, Ne, CF 4 and Cr(CO) 6. The differences between the Xα, HF, and experimental values, for localized ionization, can be traced directly to the approximate treatment of shell self-repulsion in Xα. When shell self-repulsion is properly taken into account via a simple perturbation treatment, the corrected Xα ionization energies are in excellent agreement with experiment. The strange result that the Xα delocalized solution has a lower total energy than the localized solution is similarly accounted for by correcting for the exact shell self-repulsion. The error in the Xα delocalized solution is much larger than the error for the localized solution with some important implications. The concepts of “Xα Koopmans energy” and Xα relaxation energy are shown to have practical importance is assessing whether the localized or delocalized solution is physically correct.
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