Collision-induced three-body polarizability of helium

We present the first-principles determination of the three-body polarizability and the third dielectric virial coefficient of helium. Coupled-cluster and full configuration interaction methods were used to perform electronic structure calculations. The mean absolute relative uncertainty of the trace of the polarizability tensor, resulting from the incompleteness of the orbital basis set, was found to be 4.7%. Additional uncertainty due to the approximate treatment of triple and the neglect of higher excitations was estimated at 5.7%. An analytic function was developed to describe the short-range behavior of the polarizability and its asymptotics in all fragmentation channels. We calculated the third dielectric virial coefficient and its uncertainty using the classical and semiclassical Feynman–Hibbs approaches. The results of our calculations were compared with experimental data and with recent Path-Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) calculations [Garberoglio et al., J. Chem. Phys. 155, 234103 (2021)] employing the so-called superposition approximation of the three-body polarizability. For temperatures above 200 K, we observed a significant discrepancy between the classical results obtained using superposition approximation and the ab initio computed polarizability. For temperatures from 10 K up to 200 K, the differences between PIMC and semiclassical calculations are several times smaller than the uncertainties of our results. Except at low temperatures, our results agree very well with the available experimental data but have much smaller uncertainties. The data reported in this work eliminate the main accuracy bottleneck in the optical pressure standard [Gaiser et al., Ann. Phys. 534, 2200336 (2022)] and facilitate further progress in the field of quantum metrology.