The convergence of the ab-initio many-body expansion for the cohesive energy of solid mercury

Abstract

A many-body expansion for mercury clusters of the form E = \sum_{i<j}\Delta \epsilon_{ij} + \sum_{i<j<k}\Delta \epsilon_{ijk} + ... \quad, does not converge smoothly with increasing cluster size towards the solid state. Even for smaller cluster sizes (up to n=6), where van der Waals forces still dominate, one observes bad convergence behaviour. For solid mercury the convergence of the many-body expansion can dramatically be improved by an incremental procedure within an embedded cluster approach. Here one adds the coupled cluster many-body electron correlation contributions of the embedded cluster to the bulk HF energy. In this way we obtain a cohesive energy (not corrected for zero-point vibration) of 0.79 eV in perfect agreement with the experimental value.