Relativistic corrections of order m\alpha^6 to the two-center problem

Abstract

Effective potentials of the relativistic m\alpha^6 order correction for the ground state of the Coulomb two-center problem are calculated. They can be used to evaluate the relativistic contribution of that order to the energies of hydrogen molecular ions or metastable states of the antiprotonic helium atom, where precision spectroscopic data are available. In our studies we use the variational expansion based on randomly chosen exponents that permits to achieve high numerical accuracy.