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The Slater determinant is named for John C. Slater, who introduced the determinant in 1929 as a means of ensuring the antisymmetry of a many-electron wave function, [2] although the wave function in the determinant form first appeared independently in Heisenberg's [3] and Dirac's [4] [5] articles three years earlier.
It is a special case of the configuration interaction method in which all Slater determinants (or configuration state functions, CSFs) of the proper symmetry are included in the variational procedure (i.e., all Slater determinants obtained by exciting all possible electrons to all possible virtual orbitals, orbitals which are unoccupied in the electronic ground state configuration).
In quantum chemistry, a configuration state function (CSF), is a symmetry-adapted linear combination of Slater determinants. A CSF must not be confused with a configuration . In general, one configuration gives rise to several CSFs; all have the same total quantum numbers for spin and spatial parts but differ in their intermediate couplings.
Slater determinants are constructed from sets of orthonormal spin orbitals, so that | =, making the identity matrix and simplifying the above matrix equation. The solution of the CI procedure are some eigenvalues E j {\displaystyle \mathbf {E} ^{j}} and their corresponding eigenvectors c I j {\displaystyle \mathbf {c} _{I}^{j}} .
In 1929 John C. Slater derived expressions for diagonal matrix elements of an approximate Hamiltonian while investigating atomic spectra within a perturbative approach. [1] The following year Edward Condon extended the rules to non-diagonal matrix elements. [ 2 ]
A solution to the lack of anti-symmetry in the Hartree method came when it was shown that a Slater determinant, a determinant of one-particle orbitals first used by Heisenberg and Dirac in 1926, trivially satisfies the antisymmetric property of the exact solution and hence is a suitable ansatz for applying the variational principle.
An example provided in Slater's original paper is for the iron atom which has nuclear charge 26 and electronic configuration 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6 3s 2 3p 6 3d 6 4s 2.The screening constant, and subsequently the shielded (or effective) nuclear charge for each electron is deduced as: [1]
This classification allows one to develop a set of Slater determinants for the description of the wavefunction as a linear combination of these determinants. Based on the freedom left for the occupation in the active orbitals, a certain number of electrons are allowed to populate all the active orbitals in appropriate combinations, developing a ...