It has now been a little more than a year since a fellow named Jerzy Cioslowski began making waves with a pair of articles asking the scientific community to reconsider the efficacy of drachmanization.

Cioslowski has trumpeted the supposed discovery that drachmanization suffers from certain disqualifying “limitations.” He has further directed our attention toward such fashionable alternatives as the recently introduced “plain capping” functional and the integral-transformation method.

We do not think we need to explain to educated Oblivioni readers why neither the splashy plain-capping functional nor the sexy and trendy integral-transformation method can do the job.

Cioslowski complains that drachmanization may produce incorrectly normalized densities and imperfect cusps when used with approximate wavefunctions (although even he is forced to grudgingly concede, under his breath, that plain capping is restricted to the vicinity of coalescence points, while the integral-transformation method depends upon the arbitrary selection of thresholds).

The refined Oblivioni reader understands, however, that these supposed defects are inseparable from defects in the underlying trial wavefunction. As increasingly sophisticated and highly correlated wavefunctions are used, including explicitly correlated Gaussians, the resulting errors diminish. For ultra-precise calculations of highly localized or singular quantum operators, such as the behavior of electrons extremely close to an atomic nucleus, drachmanization continues to furnish remarkably accurate expectation values within a stable, finite and usable mathematical framework.

There will always be some disingenuous upstart who seeks to make his name with a flashy and controversial attack designed to stir up controversy and steal headlines around the world! So it is with great pleasure that we note that, despite Cioslowski’s self-promoting efforts to dethrone this tried-and-true methodology, drachmanization remains very much in use. In the recently published and excellent “Rovibrational Computations for the He2 a 3-Sigma-plus-u State Including Nonadiabatic, Relativistic, and QED Corrections,” Adam Margocsy, Balazs Racsai, Peter Jeszenszki and Edit Matyus write, with wise astuteness, “‘Drachmanization’ and its numerically robust variation, numDr, was used to compute the delta-1, delta-2, HMV and P(1/r^3) expectation values along the PEC; expectation values of the other, less singular operators were computed in the standard way.”

In related recent helium-dimer work, Rácsai, Jeszenszki, Margócsy and Mátyus further report that they found numerical drachmanization more robust than the integral-transformation technique.

Sure, fashionable critics mass dangerously along the frontier, would-be giant-slayers, all of them. Thus, we drachmanization loyalists must remain vigilant. But for the moment, at least, things seem right with the world.

^^^

Editor’s note: This is a completely unbiased article.