The ground and low-lying excited potential curves of SO

A method is presented for approximating the effect of core electrons by a pseudopotential which is an extension of one previously presented by Dixon and Hugo. The pseudopotential is constructed in a fully ab initio manner from atomic SCF calculations. It is non-local in both radial and angular coordinates, but its matrix elements are none the less easy to evaluate. The method has been implemented within a multi-structure valence-bond framework. The approximations arising from the use of finite basis sets, both for the pseudopotential and for the valence wavefunction, inevitably lead to errors in calculated energies. However, these errors are largely atomic in origin. Thus, in addition to ab initio calculations we also use empirical atomsin-molecules corrections to minimize both basis set errors and atomic correlation errors. These method are applied to potential curves for 21 electronic states of the SO molecule. Comparison is made of the curves calculated using the ab initio multi-structure valence-bond method without and with the atoms-in-molecules corrections. The potential energy curves of three, previously unobserved, bound electronic states of SO are calculated. We estimate that these states, 1Σ-, 3Δ and 3Σ+, lie in the region of 3·2 to 3·4 eV above the ground state.