Going beyond no-pair relativistic quantum chemistry

The current field of relativistic quantum chemistry (RQC) has been built upon the no-pair and no-retardation approximations. While retardation effects must be treated in a time-dependent manner through quantum electrodynamics (QED) and are hence outside RQC, the no-pair approximation (NPA) has to be removed from RQC for it has some fundamental defects. Both configuration space and Fock space formulations have been proposed in the literature to do this. However, the former is simply wrong, whereas the latter is still incomplete. To resolve the old problems pertinent to the NPA itself and new problems beyond the NPA, we propose here an effective many-body (EMB) QED approach that is in full accordance with standard methodologies of electronic structure. As a first application, the full second order energy E-2 of a closed-shell many-electron system subject to the instantaneous Coulomb-Breit interaction is derived, both algebraically and diagrammatically. It is shown that the same E-2 can be obtained by means of 3 Goldstone-like diagrams through the standard many-body perturbation theory or 28 Feynman diagrams through the S-matrix technique. The NPA arises naturally by retaining only the terms involving the positive energy states. The potential dependence of the NPA can be removed by adding in the QED one-body counter terms involving the negative energy states, thereby leading to a potential-independent no-pair approximation (PI-NPA). The NPA, PI-NPA, EMB-QED, and full QED then span a continuous spectrum of relativistic molecular quantum mechanics. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.