MULTICHANNEL DENSITY-FUNCTIONAL CALCULATIONS FOR ATOMS AND ATOMIC CHAINS IN MAGNETIC-FIELDS OF COMPACT STARS

Ground-state energies of atoms and atomic chains in strong to superstr ong magnetic fields (B approximate to 2.4X10(6) - 8.5x10(8) T) are cal culated within the single-particle scheme of a heuristic density-funct ional method. From these we find condensation energies and binding len gths. Using the local Dirac exchange functional, the corresponding equ ations are solved iteratively, expanding the wave functions with respe ct to Landau functions in the transverse directions and directly integ rating along the longitudinal direction. Dropping the adiabatic approx imation, we extrapolate our results with respect to the number of Land au channels taken into account. The values found by this extrapolation correspond to calculations without any restriction on the allowed wav e functions.