A Galerkin method is developed to solve the time-dependent Dirac equation in prolate spheroidal coordinates for an electron-molecular two-center system. The initial state is evaluated from a variational principle using a kinetic/atomic balanced basis
, which allows for an efficient and accurate determination of the Dirac spectrum and eigenfunctions. B-spline basis functions are used to obtain high accuracy. This numerical method is used to compute the energy spectrum of the two-center problem and then the evolution of eigenstate wavefunctions in an external electromagnetic field.
Two numerical methods are used to evaluate the relativistic spectrum of the two-centre Coulomb problem (for the $H_{2}^{+}$ and $Th_{2}^{179+}$ diatomic molecules) in the fixed nuclei approximation by solving the single particle time-independent Dira
c equation. The first one is based on a min-max principle and uses a two-spinor formulation as a starting point. The second one is the Rayleigh-Ritz variational method combined with kinematically balanced basis functions. Both methods use a B-spline basis function expansion. We show that accurate results can be obtained with both methods and that no spurious states appear in the discretization process.
