Calculations of electric dipole polarizabilities of polyatomic molecules

Coupled and uncoupled Hartree-Fock theories are used to compute the electric dipole polarizability of water, ammonia, and methane with three different GTO basis sets. Bounds for the geometric approximation to uncoupled polarizabilities are also computed to examine the accuracy of calculated values. The results are compared with those obtained by a variational-perturbation method proposed by Rebane. The numerical tests provide some information on the correlation terms affecting total computed polarizabilities. The computed values are shown to be in fair or good agreement with experimental data for the largest basis sets. The reliability of Rebane's method with respect to coupled HF procedure is also discussed