Spherically compressed helium atom described by perturbative and variational methods

We analyze the energy spectrum of the three lowest-lying S symmetry states for the spherically confined helium atom as a function of the box radius by using an approach based on a time independent perturbation theory and two variational methods. The first treatment depends on exact solutions for confined one-electron atoms, whereas in the latter two methods exponents and linear coefficients are variationally optimized via {s,t,u}{s,t,u}-Hylleraas functions and Generalized {r1,r2,r12}{r1,r2,r12}-Hylleraas basis sets that fulfill appropriate boundary conditions. Although it is found that throughout most of the box radii here analyzed the variational energies for the three states lie below those perturbatively obtained, an opposite trend occurs toward the weak and strong confinement regions for the singlet excited and triplet states, respectively.