ESTIMATES OF RELATIVISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO MOLECULAR-PROPERTIES

A simple method for the estimation of the relativistic contribution to atomic and molecular properties is proposed. The method assumes that the dominant portion of relativistic contribution to different properties is accounted for by the Cowan-Griffin operator. In contrast to recently investigated variational relativistic and quasirelativistic approaches, the present method is based virtually on the triple-perturbation theory approach and can be easily executed in the framework of the finite-field perturbation schemes. The method proposed in this paper is applied to the evaluation of the relativistic contribution to electric properties of hydrogen halides. This contribution turns out to be completely negligible in the case of HCl. For the HI molecule, the relativistic correction to its dipole moment becomes almost as important as the electron correlation effects. A similar result is also obtained in the case of the dipole moment of AgH. Different possible applications of the present method are discussed. The major advantage of the proposed perturbation approach is a very simple computational structure which permits the calculation of relativistic corrections from any available nonrelativistic wave function. © 1990 American Institute of Physics.