Evaluation of Hylleraas-CI atomic integrals by integration over the coordinates of one electron. I. Three-electron integrals

A method to evaluate the nonrelativistic electron-repulsion, nuclear attraction and kinetic energy three-electron integrals over Slater orbitals appearing in Hylleraas-CI (Hy-CI) electron structure calculations on atoms is shown. It consists on the direct integration over the interelectronic coordinate r ij and the sucessive integration over the coordinates of one of the electrons. All the integrals are expressed as linear combinations of basic two-electron integrals. These last are solved in terms of auxiliary two-electron integrals which are easy to compute and have high accuracy. The use of auxiliary three-electron ones is avoided, with great saving of storage memory. Therefore this method can be used for Hy-CI calculations on atoms with number of electrons N ≥ 5. It has been possible to calculate the kinetic energy also in terms of basic two-electron integrals by using the Hamiltonian in Hylleraas coordinates, for this purpose some mathematical aspects like derivatives of the spherical harmonics with respect to the polar angles and recursion relations are treated and some new relations are given.