Variational vs perturbative relativistic energies for small and light atomic and molecular systems

Variational and perturbative relativistic energies are computed and compared for two-electron atoms and molecules with low nuclear charge numbers. In general, good agreement of the two approaches is observed. Remaining deviations can be attributed to higher-order relativistic, also called non-radiative quantum electrodynamics (QED), corrections of the perturbative approach that are automatically included in the variational solution of the no-pair Dirac-Coulomb-Breit (DCB) equation to all orders of the α fine-structure constant. The analysis of the polynomial α dependence of the DCB energy makes it possible to determine the leading-order relativistic correction to the non-relativistic energy to high precision without regularization. Contributions from the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian, for which expectation values converge slowly due the singular terms, are implicitly included in the variational procedure. The α dependence of the no-pair DCB energy shows that the higher-order (α⁴E_h) non-radiative QED correction is 5% of the leading-order (α³E_h) non-radiative QED correction for Z = 2 (He), but it is 40% already for Z = 4 (Be²⁺), which indicates that resummation provided by the variational procedure is important already for intermediate nuclear charge numbers.