Non-perturbative treatment of molecules in linear magnetic fields: calculation of anapole susceptibilities

In the present study a non-perturbative approach to ab initio calculations of molecules in strong, linearly varying, magnetic fields is developed. The use of London atomic orbitals (LAOs) for non-uniform magnetic fields is discussed and the standard rationale of gauge-origin invariance is generalized to invariance under arbitrary constant shifts of the magnetic vector potential. Our approach is applied to study magnetically induced anapole moments (or toroidal moments) and the related anapole susceptibilities for a test set of chiral and nonchiral molecules. For the first time numerical anapole moments are accessible on an ab initio level of theory. Our results show that the use of London atomic orbitals dramatically improves the basis set convergence also for magnetic properties related to non-uniform magnetic fields, at the cost that the Hellmann-Feynman theorem does not apply for a finite LAO basis set. It is shown that the mixed anapole susceptibility can be related to chirality, since its trace vanishes for an achiral molecule.