No Arabic abstract
State-of-the-art methods for calculating neutral excitation energies are typically demanding and limited to single electron-hole pairs and their composite plasmons. Here we introduce excitonic density-functional theory (XDFT) a computationally light, generally applicable, first-principles technique for calculating neutral excitations based on generalized constrained DFT. In order to simulate an M-particle excited state of an N-electron system, XDFT automatically optimizes a constraining potential to confine N-M electrons within the ground-state Kohn-Sham valence subspace. We demonstrate the efficacy of XDFT by calculating the lowest single-particle singlet and triplet excitation energies of the well-known Thiel molecular test set, with results which are in excellent agreement with time-dependent DFT. Furthermore, going beyond the capability of adiabatic time-dependent DFT, we show that XDFT can successfully capture double excitations. Overall our method makes optical gaps, excition bindings and oscillator strengths readily accessible at a computational cost comparable to that of standard DFT. As such, XDFT appears as an ideal candidate to work within high-throughput discovery frameworks and within linear-scaling methods for large systems.
Semi-local approximations to the density functional for the exchange-correlation energy of a many-electron system necessarily fail for lobed one-electron densities, including not only the familiar stretched densities but also the less familiar but closely-related noded ones. The Perdew-Zunger (PZ) self-interaction correction (SIC) to a semi-local approximation makes that approximation exact for all one-electron ground- or excited-state densities and accurate for stretched bonds. When the minimization of the PZ total energy is made over real localized orbitals, the orbital densities can be noded, leading to energy errors in many-electron systems. Minimization over complex localized orbitals yields nodeless orbital densities, which reduce but typically do not eliminate the SIC errors of atomization energies. Other errors of PZ SIC remain, attributable to the loss of the exact constraints and appropriate norms that the semi-local approximations satisfy, and suggesting the need for a generalized SIC. These conclusions are supported by calculations for one-electron densities, and for many-electron molecules. While PZ SIC raises and improves the energy barriers of standard generalized gradient approximations (GGAs) and meta-GGAs, it reduces and often worsens the atomization energies of molecules. Thus PZ SIC raises the energy more as the nodality of the valence localized orbitals increases from atoms to molecules to transition states. PZ SIC is applied here in particular to the SCAN meta-GGA, for which the correlation part is already self-interaction-free. That property makes SCAN a natural first candidate for a generalized SIC.
MOLSCAT is a general-purpose package for performing non-reactive quantum scattering calculations for atomic and molecular collisions using coupled-channel methods. Simple atom-molecule and molecule-molecule collision types are coded internally and additional ones may be handled with plug-in routines. Plug-in routines may include external magnetic, electric or photon fields (and combinations of them). Simple interaction potentials are coded internally and more complicated ones may be handled with plug-in routines. BOUND is a general-purpose package for performing calculations of bound-state energies in weakly bound atomic and molecular systems using coupled-channel methods. It solves the same sets of coupled equations as MOLSCAT, and can use the same plug-in routines if desired, but with different boundary conditions. FIELD is a development of BOUND that locates external fields at which a bound state exists with a specified energy. One important use is to locate the positions of magnetically tunable Feshbach resonance positions in ultracold collisions. Versions of these programs before version 2019.0 were released separately. However, there is a significant degree of overlap between their internal structures and usage specifications. This manual therefore describes all three, with careful identification of parts that are specific to one or two of the programs.
In a recent communication, Weber and co-workers presented a surprising study on charge-localization effects in the N,N-dimethylpiperazine (DMP+) diamine cation to provide a stringent test of density functional theory (DFT) methods. Within their study, the authors examined various DFT methods and concluded that all DFT functionals commonly used today, including hybrid functionals with exact exchange, fail to predict a stable charge-localized state. This surprising conclusion is based on the authors use of a self-interaction correction (namely, complex-valued Perdew-Zunger Self-Interaction Correction (PZ-SIC)) to DFT, which appears to give excellent agreement with experiment and other wavefunction-based benchmarks. Since the publication of this recent communication, the same DMP+ molecule has been cited in numerous subsequent studies as a prototypical example of the importance of self-interaction corrections for accurately calculating other chemical systems. In this correspondence, we have carried out new high-level CCSD(T) analyses on the DMP+ cation to show that DFT actually performs quite well for this system (in contrast to their conclusion that all DFT functionals fail), whereas the PZ-SIC approach used by Weber et al. is the outlier that is inconsistent with the high-level CCSD(T) (coupled-cluster with single and double excitations and perturbative triples) calculations. Our new findings and analysis for this system are briefly discussed in this correspondence.
The recent advent of chirped-pulse FTMW technology has created a plethora of pure rotational spectra for molecules for which no vibrational information is known. The growing number of such spectra demands a way to build empirical potential energy surfaces for molecules, without relying on any vibrational measurements. Using ZnO as an example, we demonstrate a powerful technique for efficiently accomplishing this. We first measure eight new ultra-high precision ($pm2$ kHz) pure rotational transitions in the $X$-state of ZnO. Combining them with previous high-precision ($pm50$ kHz) pure rotational measurements of different transitions in the same system, we have data that spans the bottom 10% of the well. Despite not using any vibrational information, our empirical potentials are able to determine the size of the vibrational spacings and bond lengths, with precisions that are more than three and two orders of magnitude greater, respectively, than the most precise empirical values previously known, and the most accurate emph{ab initio} calculations in todays reach. By calculating the $C_{6},$ $C_{8},$ and $C_{10}$ long-range constants and using them to anchor the top of the well, our potential is emph{globally} in excellent agreement with emph{ab initio} calculations, without the need for vibrational spectra and without the need for emph{any} data in the top 90% of the well.
The method of McCurdy, Baertschy, and Rescigno, J. Phys. B, 37, R137 (2004) is generalized to obtain a straightforward, surprisingly accurate, and scalable numerical representation for calculating the electronic wave functions of molecules. It uses a basis set of product sinc functions arrayed on a Cartesian grid, and yields 1 kcal/mol precision for valence transition energies with a grid resolution of approximately 0.1 bohr. The Coulomb matrix elements are replaced with matrix elements obtained from the kinetic energy operator. A resolution-of-the-identity approximation renders the primitive one- and two-electron matrix elements diagonal; in other words, the Coulomb operator is local with respect to the grid indices. The calculation of contracted two-electron matrix elements among orbitals requires only O(N log(N)) multiplication operations, not O(N^4), where N is the number of basis functions; N = n^3 on cubic grids. The representation not only is numerically expedient, but also produces energies and properties superior to those calculated variationally. Absolute energies, absorption cross sections, transition energies, and ionization potentials are reported for one- (He^+, H_2^+ ), two- (H_2, He), ten- (CH_4) and 56-electron (C_8H_8) systems.