No Arabic abstract
The Breit correction, the finite-light-speed correction for the Coulomb interaction of the electron-electron interaction in $ O left( 1/ c^2 right) $, is introduced to density functional theory (DFT) based on the non-relativistic reduction with the local density approximation. Using this newly developed relativistic DFT, it is found that the possible outer-most electron of lawrencium atom is the $ p $ orbital instead of the $ d $ orbital, which is consistent with the previous calculations based on wave-function theory. A possible explanation of the anomalous behavior of its first ionization energy is also given. This DFT scheme provides a practical calculation method for the study of properties of super-heavy elements.
We extend density functional perturbation theory for lattice dynamics with fully relativistic ultrasoft pseudopotentials to magnetic materials. Our approach is based on the application of the time-reversal operator to the Sternheimer linear system and to its self-consistent solutions. Moreover, we discuss how to include in the formalism the symmetry operations of the magnetic point group which require the time-reversal operator. We validate our implementation by comparison with the frozen phonon method in fcc Ni and in a monatomic ferromagnetic Pt wire.
Density functional theory calculations use a significant fraction of current supercomputing time. The resources required scale with the problem size, internal workings of the code and the number of iterations to convergence, the latter being controlled by what is called mixing. This note describes a new approach to handling trust-regions within these and other fixed-point problems. Rather than adjusting the trust-region based upon improvement, the prior steps are used to estimate what the parameters and trust-regions should be, effectively estimating the optimal Polyak step from the prior history. Detailed results are shown for eight structures using both the Good and Bad Multisecan
Orbital-free density functional theory (OF-DFT) is a promising method for large-scale quantum mechanics simulation as it provides a good balance of accuracy and computational cost. Its applicability to large-scale simulations has been aided by progress in constructing kinetic energy functionals and local pseudopotentials. However, the widespread adoption of OF-DFT requires further improvement in its efficiency and robustly implemented software. Here we develop a real-space finite-difference method for the numerical solution of OF-DFT in periodic systems. Instead of the traditional self-consistent method, a powerful scheme for energy minimization is introduced to solve the Euler--Lagrange equation. Our approach engages both the real-space finite-difference method and a direct energy-minimization scheme for the OF-DFT calculations. The method is coded into the ATLAS software package and benchmarked using periodic systems of solid Mg, Al, and Al$_{3}$Mg. The test results show that our implementation can achieve high accuracy, efficiency, and numerical stability for large-scale simulations.
A relativistic density-functional theory based on a Fock-space effective quantum-electrodynamics (QED) Hamiltonian using the Coulomb or Coulomb-Breit two-particle interaction is developed. This effective QED theory properly includes the effects of vacuum polarization through the creation of electron-positron pairs but does not include explicitly the photon degrees of freedom. It is thus a more tractable alternative to full QED for atomic and molecular calculations. Using the constrained-search formalism, a Kohn-Sham scheme is formulated in a quite similar way to non-relativistic density-functional theory, and some exact properties of the involved density functionals are studied, namely charge-conjugation symmetry and uniform coordinate scaling. The usual no-pair Kohn-Sham scheme is obtained as a well-defined approximation to this relativistic density-functional theory.
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.