Quaternion Dirac–Coulomb–Breit integral transformation for relativistic four-component correlated electronic structure theory

Abstract

High-accuracy correlated four-component relativistic electronic structure methods are typically formulated in terms of integrals over molecular orbitals (MOs). Consequently, an efficient and scalable strategy is required to deal with the complexity of transforming relativistic two-electron integrals from the atomic orbital (AO) to the MO basis. The transformation bottleneck is particularly acute for approaches that include Breit interaction integrals, whose computational and memory demands further exacerbate the transformation cost. To overcome this challenge, we develop a quaternion-based, AO-driven direct integral transformation scheme. The method operates on scalar AO integrals and combines quaternion density-based contractions with direct Cauchy–Schwarz screening to systematically exploit integral locality. As a result, the proposed framework substantially lowers the practical computational scaling and provides an efficient, memory-conscious, and highly parallelizable pathway for the routine inclusion of relativistic Dirac–Coulomb–Breit integrals in large-scale four-component correlated calculations.