Effective Valence Shell Hamiltonian Calculations on Spin-Orbit Coupling of SiH, SiH+, and SiH2+

Recently the ab initio effective valence shell Hamiltonian method $H^v$ has been extended to treat spin-orbit coupling in atoms or molecules. The quasidegenerate many-body perturbation theory based $H^v$ method has an advantage of determining the spin-orbit coupling energies of all valence states for both the neutral species and its ions with a similar accuracy from a single computation of the effective spin-orbit coupling operator. The new spin-orbit $H^v$ method is applied to calculating the fine structure splittings of the valence states of SiH, $SiH^+$, and $SiH^{2+}$ not only to assess the accuracy of the method but also to investigate the spin-orbit interaction of highly excited states of SiH species. The computed spin-orbit splittings for ground states are in good agreement with experiment and the few available ab initio computations. The ordering of fine structure levels of the bound and quasi-bound spin-orbit coupled valence states of SiH and its ions, for which neither experiment nor theory is available, is predicted.