Determination of the dipole polarizability of the alkali-metal negative ions

TL;DR

This paper calculates the electric dipole polarizabilities of alkali-metal negative ions using advanced relativistic many-body methods, analyzing correlation and relativistic effects, and providing precise values with uncertainty estimates.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive relativistic many-body approach to accurately determine polarizabilities of alkali-metal negative ions, including effects of Breit and QED interactions.

Findings

Relativistic and correlation effects significantly influence polarizability values.

The study provides the most precise polarizability estimates for these ions to date.

Comparison with other calculations shows good agreement and improved accuracy.

Abstract

We present electric dipole polarizabilities ($\alpha_d$) of the alkali-metal negative ions, from H$^-$ to Fr$^-$, by employing four-component relativistic many-body methods. Differences in the results are shown by considering Dirac-Coulomb (DC) Hamiltonian, DC Hamiltonian with the Breit interaction, and DC Hamiltonian with the lower-order quantum electrodynamics interactions. At first, these interactions are included self-consistently in the Dirac-Hartree-Fock (DHF) method, and then electron correlation effects are incorporated over the DHF wave functions in the second-order many-body perturbation theory, random phase approximation and coupled-cluster (CC) theory. Roles of electron correlation effects and relativistic corrections are analyzed using the above many-body methods with size of the ions. We finally quote precise values of $\alpha_d$ of the above negative ions by estimating uncertainties to the CC results, and compare them with other calculations wherever available.