A relativistic time-dependent density functional study of the excited states of the mercury dimer

J Chem Phys. 2014 Jan 14;140(2):024304. doi: 10.1063/1.4859258.

Abstract

In previous works on Zn2 and Cd2 dimers we found that the long-range corrected CAMB3LYP gives better results than other density functional approximations for the excited states, especially in the asymptotic region. In this paper, we use it to present a time-dependent density functional (TDDFT) study for the ground-state as well as the excited states corresponding to the (6s(2) + 6s6p), (6s(2) + 6s7s), and (6s(2) + 6s7p) atomic asymptotes for the mercury dimer Hg2. We analyze its spectrum obtained from all-electron calculations performed with the relativistic Dirac-Coulomb and relativistic spinfree Hamiltonian as implemented in DIRAC-PACKAGE. A comparison with the literature is given as far as available. Our result is excellent for the most of the lower excited states and very encouraging for the higher excited states, it shows generally good agreements with experimental results and outperforms other theoretical results. This enables us to give a detailed analysis of the spectrum of the Hg2 including a comparative analysis with the lighter dimers of the group 12, Cd2, and Zn2, especially for the relativistic effects, the spin-orbit interaction, and the performance of CAMB3LYP and is enlightened for similar systems. The result shows, as expected, that spinfree Hamiltonian is less efficient than Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian for systems containing heavy elements such as Hg2.