Electronic structure of molecules using relativistic effective core potentials

In this review an approach is outlined for studying molecules containing heavy atoms with the use of relativistic effective core potentials (RECP's). These potentials play the dual roles of (1) replacing the chemically-inert core electrons and (2) incorporating the mass velocity and Darwin term into a one-electron effective potential. This reduces the problem to a valence-electron problem and avoids computation of additional matrix elements involving relativistic operators. The spin-orbit effects are subsequently included using the molecular orbitals derived from the RECP calculation as a basis