How Large are Nonadiabatic Effects in Atomic and Diatomic Systems?

Abstract: With recent developments in simulating nonadiabatic systems to high accuracy, it has become possible to determine how much energy is attributed to nuclear quantum effects beyond zero-point energy. In this work we calculate the non-relativistic ground-state energies of atomic and molecular systems without the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. For this purpose we utilize the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method, in which the nodes depend on both the electronic and ionic positions. We report ground-state energies for all systems studied, ionization energies for the first-row atoms and atomization energies for the first-row hydrides. We find the ionization energies of the atoms to be nearly independent of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, within the accuracy of our results. The atomization energies of molecular systems, however, show small effects of the nonadiabatic coupling between electrons and nuclei.