Electric Dipole Polarizability of Atoms by the Hartree—Fock Method. I. Theory for Closed-Shell Systems

A method for the calculation of the dipole polarizabilities of closed-shell atomic systems is presented. This method involves the direct calculation of the Hartree—Fock wavefunction of the atom in the presence of the perturbing field. The orbitals are expressed as linear combinations of Slater-type functions. A large number of carefully chosen and optimized basis functions are used so as to assure a good fit to the true Hartree—Fock wavefunction. The polarizability is then calculated from the limiting value of α=p/F for F=0, where F is the electric field strength, and p is the induced dipole moment.