Non-adiabatic perturbation theory of the exact factorisation

Abstract

We present a novel nonadiabatic perturbation theory (NAPT) for correlated systems of electrons and nuclei beyond the Born-Oppenheimer (BO) approximation. The essence of the method is to exploit the smallness of the electronic-to-nuclear mass ratio by treating the electron-nuclear correlation terms in the electronic equation of motion of the exact factorisation (EF) framework as perturbation. We prove that any finite-order truncation of the NAPT preserves the normalisation of the conditional electronic factor as well as the gauge covariance of the resulting perturbative equations of motion. We illustrate the usefulness of NAPT by obtaining nonadiabatic corrections to the BO Berry phase in Jahn--Teller systems with a conical intersection. It well captures the departure of the exact Berry phase from being topological via the lowest-order NAPT. By removing the conical intersection with a constant gap, it further yields the correct scaling of the Berry phase toward zero.