IMPROVED ATOMIC PHYSICS CALCULATIONS

Abstract

A method is developed for calculating the energy of a definite state of an N-electron system. The method uses a form of the Bethe–Goldstone equation to calculate the correlation energy of an interacting electron pair moving in the nuclear Coulomb field and in the average field of the other electrons. A calculation on the ground state of the lithium atom gives an energy which differs from the accurate value by less than 0.1%.