Near-exact treatment of seniority-zero ground and excited states with a Richardson-Gaudin mean-field.

Eigenvectors of the reduced Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) Hamiltonian, Richardson-Gaudin (RG) states, are used as a variational wavefunction ansatz for strongly correlated electronic systems. These states are geminal products whose coefficients are solutions of non-linear equations. Previous results showed an un-physical apparent avoided crossing in ground state dissociation curves for hydrogen chains.