Two-component relativistic density-functional calculations of the dimers of the halogens from bromine through element...

A two-component quasirelativistic Hamiltonian based on spin-dependent effective core potentials is used to calculate ionization energies and electron affinities of the heavy halogen atom bromine through the superheavy element 117 (eka-astatine) as well as spectroscopic constants of the homonuclear dimers of these atoms. We describe a two-component Hartree-Fock and density-functional program that treats spin-orbit coupling self-consistently within the orbital optimization procedure. A comparison with results from high-order Douglas-Kroll calculations--for the superheavy systems also with zeroth-order regular approximation and four-component Dirac results--demonstrates the validity of the pseudopotential approximation. The density-functional (but not the Hartree-Fock) results show very satisfactory agreement with theoretical coupled cluster as well as experimental data where available, such that the theoretical results can serve as an estimate for the hitherto unknown properties of astatine, element 117, and their dimers.