Ground states of H, He,…, Ne, and their singly positive ions in strong magnetic fields: The high-field regime

Abstract

The electronic structure of the ground and some excited states of neutral atoms with the nuclear charge numbers 1 ≤ Z ≤ 10 and their single positive ions are investigated by means of our 2D mesh Hartree-Fock method for strong magnetic fields 0.5 ≤ γ ≤ 10000.

Beryllium in strong magnetic fields

“…Data from the literature to compare with are only available for the ground state 1 5 (−3) + of this symmetry and only Hartree-Fock results in the strong field regime. Comparing with the latter data [28] our total energies are systematically lower by a relative change of 5 × 10 −4 . In this subsection we discuss the spin quintet states with magnetic quantum numbers −3 and −6 possessing negative and positive z−parity, respectively.…”

“…a crossover of several states individually representing the ground state of the atom for a certain interval of field strengths takes place. The orbital and spin Zeeman-terms are important for the identification of the field-dependent global ground state [27,28,33,39,40]. Beyond this the magnetically tightly bound orbitals [2,41] compared to the non-tightly bound orbitals/states play a central role for the determination of the ground state.…”

“…Thereby our knowledge on the electronic structure of the lithium atom in a strong magnetic field has been advanced significantly (for the state-of-the-art before this work see Refs. [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]). …”

“…For γ ≥ 0.5 the only available values for the total energies in the literature are due to the Hartree-Fock approach employed in Ref. [28]. The ionization energy of the first excited state 2 3 (−3) + increases monotonically for γ < 5 but shows a decrease when doubling the field strength to γ = 10.…”

Atmospheres and radiating surfaces of neutron stars

“…But for manyelectron atoms the condition of applicability of the adiabatic approximation γ ≫ Z 3 n is too restrictive. It is overcome in the mesh Hartree-Fock method, where each oneelectron orbital is numerically determined as a function of the longitudinal (z) and radial coordinates on a twodimensional mesh [298] (see also [299], and references therein), and in the "twice self-consistent" method [300], where a transverse part of each orbital is presented as a linear superposition of the Landau functions with numerically optimized coefficients. These works gave a number of important results but were not realized in astrophysical applications.…”