Finite-basis-set approach to the Dirac-Hartree-Fock equations.

A variational Dirac-Hartree-Fock procedure is introduced which does not exhibit problems of spurious roots, variational collapse, or continuum dissolution. The optimized eigenvalues converge uniformly from above to the numerical Dirac-Hartree-Fock results as the dimension of the basis set is increased. Results for the 1s-italic/sup 2/, 2s-italic/sup 2/, and 2p-italic/sub 1/2//sup 2/ shells are presented as examples.