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Elastic and spin-changing inelastic collision cross sections are presented for cold and ultracold magnetically trapped NH. The cross sections are obtained from coupled-channel scattering calculations as a function of energy and magnetic field. We specifically investigate the influence of the intramolecular spin-spin, spin-rotation, and intermolecular magnetic dipole coupling on the collision dynamics. It is shown that $^{15}$NH is a very suitable candidate for evaporative cooling experiments. The dominant trap-loss mechanism in the ultracold regime originates from the intermolecular dipolar coupling term. At higher energies and fields, intramolecular spin-spin coupling becomes increasingly important. Our qualitative results and conclusions are fairly independent of the exact form of the potential and of the size of the channel basis set., Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. A

We investigate the energetics of reactions involving pairs of alkali metal dimers. Atom exchange reactions to form homonuclear dimers are energetically allowed for some but not all of the heteronuclear dimers. We carry out high-level electronic structure calculations on the potential energy surfaces of all the heteronuclear alkali metal trimers and show that trimer formation reactions are always energetically forbidden for low-lying singlet states of the dimers. The results have important implications for the stability of quantum gases of alkali metal dimers., Comment: Version responding to referees comments, with updated references and numerical changes in Table 3, but conclusions unchanged

We investigate the interactions between ultracold alkali metal atoms and closed-shell atoms using electronic structure calculations on the prototype system Rb+Sr. There are molecular bound states that can be tuned across atomic thresholds with magnetic field, and there are previously neglected terms in the collision Hamiltonian that can produce zero-energy Feshbach resonances with significant widths. The largest effect comes from the interaction-induced variation of the Rb hyperfine coupling. The resonances may be used to form paramagnetic polar molecules if the magnetic field can be controlled precisely enough., 5 pages, 2 figures

We present four-dimensional ab initio potential energy surfaces for the three different spin states of the NH((3)Sigma(-))-NH((3)Sigma(-)) complex. The potentials are partially based on the work of Dhont et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 123, 184302 (2005)]. The surface for the quintet state is obtained at the RCCSD(T)/augmented correlation-consistent polarized valence triple-zeta (aug-cc-pVTZ) level of theory and the energy differences with the singlet and triplet states are calculated at the complete active space with nth-order perturbation theory/aug-cc-pVTZ (n=2,3) level of theory. The ab initio potentials are fitted to coupled spherical harmonics in the angular coordinates, and the long range is further expanded as a power series in 1/R. The RCCSD(T) potential is corrected for a size-consistency error of about 0.5x10(-6) E(h) prior to fitting. The long-range coefficients obtained from the fit are found to be in good agreement with first and second-order perturbation theory calculations.

We propose a "DFT+dispersion" treatment which avoids double counting of dispersion terms by deriving the dispersion-free density functional theory (DFT) interaction energy and combining it with DFT-based dispersion. The formalism involves self-consistent polarization of DFT monomers restrained by the exclusion principle via the Pauli-blockade technique. Any exchange-correlation potential can be used within monomers, but only the exchange operates between them. The applications to rare-gas dimers, ion-rare-gas interactions, and hydrogen bonds demonstrate that the interaction energies agree with benchmark values.

We present an implementation of symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) to interactions of high-spin open-shell monomers forming high-spin dimers. The monomer spin-orbitals used in the expressions for the electrostatic and exchange contributions to the interaction energy are obtained from density functional theory using a spin-restricted formulation of the open-shell Kohn-Sham (ROKS) method. The dispersion and induction energies are expressed through the density-density response functions predicted by the time-dependent ROKS theory. The method was applied to several systems: NH...He, CN...Ne, H2O...HO2, and NH...NH. It provides accuracy comparable to that of the best previously available methods such as the open-shell coupled-cluster method with single, double, and noniterative triple excitations, RCCSD(T), with a significantly reduced computational cost.

We report an ab initio study of the van der Waals region of the O(3P)–H2 potential energy surface based on RCCSD(T) calculations with an aug-cc-pVQZ basis supplemented by bond functions. In addition, an open-shell implementation of symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) is used to corroborate the RCCSD(T) calculations and to investigate the relative magnitudes of the various contributions to the van der Waals interaction. We also investigate the effect of the spin–orbit coupling on the position and depth of the van der Waals well. We predict the van der Waals minimum to occur in perpendicular geometry, and located at a closer distance than a secondary well in colinear geometry. The potentials obtained in the present study confirm the previous calculations of Alexander [M. H. Alexander, J. Chem. Phys., 1998, 108, 4467], but disagree with the earlier work of Harding and co-workers [Z. Li, V. A. Apkarian and L. B. Harding, J. Chem. Phys., 1997, 106, 942] as well as with recently refitted surfaces of Brandao and coworkers [J. Brandao, C. Mogo and B. C. Silva, J. Chem. Phys., 2004, 121, 8861]. Inclusion of spin–orbit coupling reduces the depth of the van der Waals minimum without causing a change in its position.