Variational treatment of the Dirac-Coulomb-Gaunt or Dirac-Coulomb-Breit two-electron interaction at the Dirac-Hartree-Fock level is the starting point of high-accuracy four-component calculations of atomic and molecular systems. In this work, we introduce, for the first time, the scalar Hamiltonians derived from the Dirac-Coulomb-Gaunt and Dirac-Coulomb-Breit operators based on spin separation in the Pauli quaternion basis. While the widely used spin-free Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian includes only the direct Coulomb and exchange terms that resemble nonrelativistic two-electron interactions, the scalar Gaunt operator adds a scalar spin-spin term. The spin separation of the gauge operator gives rise to an additional scalar orbit-orbit interaction in the scalar Breit Hamiltonian. Benchmark calculations of Aun (n = 2-8) show that the scalar Dirac-Coulomb-Breit Hamiltonian can capture 99.99% of the total energy with only 10% of the computational cost when real-valued arithmetic is used, compared to the full Dirac-Coulomb-Breit Hamiltonian. The scalar relativistic formulation developed in this work lays the theoretical foundation for the development of high-accuracy, low-cost correlated variational relativistic many-body theory.
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