Electronic Spectra of Ytterbium Fluoride from Relativistic Electronic Structure Calculations

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced relativistic electronic structure calculations to analyze the low-lying excited states of YbF, a molecule relevant for electron EDM experiments, revealing the configurations and interactions of states near the ground state.

Contribution

It introduces a combined approach using different Fock space sectors and an adiabatization model to accurately characterize low-lying excited states of YbF.

Findings

Identification of states from different configurations around the ground state

States from different Fock space sectors are nearly orthogonal and complementary

Development of an adiabatization model for state energy extraction

Abstract

We report an investigation of the low-lying excited states of the YbF molecule--a candidate molecule for experimental measurements of the electron electric dipole moment--with 2-component based multi-reference configuration interaction (MRCI), equation of motion coupled cluster (EOM-CCSD) and the extrapolated intermediate Hamiltonian Fock-space coupled cluster (XIHFS-CCSD). Specifically, we address the question of the nature of these low-lying states in terms of configurations containing filled or partially-filled Yb $4f$ shells. We show that while it does not appear possible to carry out calculations with both kinds of configurations contained in the same active space, reliable information can be extracted from different sectors of Fock space--that is, by performing electron attachment and detachment IHFS-CCSD and EOM-CCSD calculation on the closed-shell YbF$^+$ and YbF$^-$ species, respectively. From these we observe $\Omega = 1/2, 3/2$ states that arise from the $4f^{13}\sigma_{6s}^2$, $4f^{14}5d$/$6p$, and $4f^{13}5d\sigma_{6s}$ configurations appear in the same energy range around the ground-state equilibrium geometry and they are therefore able to interact. As these states are generated from different sectors of Fock space, they are almost orthogonal and provide complementary descriptions of parts of the excited state manifold. To obtain a comprehensive picture, we introduce a simple adiabatization model to extract energies of interacting $\Omega = 1/2, 3/2$ states that can be compared to experimental observations.