Hartree–Fock method

Summary

The Hartree–Fock method approximates the ground state of a system of many electrons by a single Slater determinant, an antisymmetrised product of one-electron orbitals. It chooses the orbitals that minimise the energy, by the variational method, so its energy is an upper bound for the true ground state energy. The minimising orbitals solve a nonlinear eigenvalue problem, the Hartree–Fock equations, in which each electron feels the mean field of the others. It is the starting point of most methods of quantum chemistry, and the difference from the exact energy is called the correlation energy.