Electronic structure of first and second row atoms under harmonic confinement

Atoms under pressure undergo a number of modifications of their electronic structure. Good examples are the spontaneous ionization, stabilization of excited-state configurations, and contraction of atomic-shells. In this work, we study the effects of confinement with harmonic potentials on the electronic structure of atoms from H to Ne. Dynamic and static correlation is taken into account with coupled cluster with single and double excitations and CASSCF calculations. Because the strength of harmonic confinement cannot be translated into pressure, we envisioned a “calibration” method to transform confinement into pressure. We focused on the effect of confinement on: (a) changes of electron distribution and localization within the K and L shells, (b) confinement-induced ionization pressure, (c) level crossing of electronic states, and (d) correlation energy. We found that contraction of valence and core-shells are not negligible and that the use of standard pseudopotentials might be not adequate to study solids under extreme pressures. The critical pressure at which atoms ionize follows a periodic trend, and it ranges from 28 GPa for Li to 10.8 TPa for Ne. In Li and Be, pressure induces mixing of the ground state configuration with excited states. At high pressure, the ground states of Li and Be become a doublet and a triplet with configurations 1s²2p and 1s²2s2p, respectively, which could change the chemistry of Be. Finally, it is observed that atoms with fewer electrons correlation increases, but for atoms with more electrons, the increasing of kinetic energy dominates over electron correlation.