A Kohn-Sham (KS) inversion determines a KS potential and orbitals corresponding to a given electron density, a procedure that has applications in developing and evaluating functionals used in density functional theory. Despite the utility of KS
Last year, at least 30,000 scientific papers used the Kohn-Sham scheme of density functional theory to solve electronic structure problems in a wide variety of scientific fields, ranging from materials science to biochemistry to astrophysics. Machine learning holds the promise of learning the kinetic energy functional via examples, by-passing the need to solve the Kohn-Sham equations. This should yield substantial savings in computer time, allowing either larger systems or longer time-scales to be tackled, but attempts to machine-learn this functional have been limited by the need to find its derivative. The present work overcomes this difficulty by directly learning the density-potential and energy-density maps for test systems and various molecules. Both improved accuracy and lower computational cost with this method are demonstrated by reproducing DFT energies for a range of molecular geometries generated during molecular dynamics simulations. Moreover, the methodology could be applied directly to quantum chemical calculations, allowing construction of density functionals of quantum-chemical accuracy.
Using a simplified one-dimensional model of a diatomic molecule, the associated interacting density and corresponding Kohn-Sham potential have been obtained analytically for all fractional molecule occupancies $N$ between 0 and 2. For the homonuclear case, and in the dissociation limit, the exact Kohn-Sham potential builds a barrier at the midpoint between the two atoms, whose strength increases linearly with $N$, with $1 < N leq 2$. In the heteronuclear case, the disociating KS potential besides the barrier also exhibits a plateau around the atom with the higher ionization potential, whose size (but not its strength) depends on $N$. An anomalous zero-order scaling of the Kohn-Sham potential with regards to the strength of the electron-electron repulsion is clearly displayed by our model; without this property both the unusual barrier and plateau features will be absent.
Knowledge of exact properties of the exchange-correlation (xc) functional is important for improving the approximations made within density functional theory. Features such as steps in the exact xc potential are known to be necessary for yielding accurate densities, yet little is understood regarding their shape, magnitude and location. We use systems of a few electrons, where the exact electron density is known, to demonstrate general properties of steps. We find that steps occur at points in the electron density where there is a change in the `local effective ionization energy of the electrons. We provide practical arguments, based on the electron density, for determining the position, shape and height of steps for ground-state systems, and extend the concepts to time-dependent systems. These arguments are intended to inform the development of approximate functionals, such as the mixed localization potential (MLP), which already demonstrate their capability to produce steps in the Kohn-Sham potential.
We present a method to invert a given density and find the Kohn-Sham (KS) potential in Density Functional Theory (DFT) which shares that density. Our method employs the concept of screening density, which is naturally constrained by the inversion procedure and thus ensures the density being inverted leads to a smooth KS potential with correct asymptotic behaviour. We demonstrate the applicability of our method by inverting both local (LDA) and non-local (Hartree-Fock and Coupled Cluster) densities; we also show how the method can be used to mitigate the effects of self-interactions in common DFT potentials with appropriate constraints on the screening density.
A detailed account of the Kohn-Sham algorithm from quantum chemistry, formulated rigorously in the very general setting of convex analysis on Banach spaces, is given here. Starting from a Levy-Lieb-type functional, its convex and lower semi-continuous extension is regularized to obtain differentiability. This extra layer allows to rigorously introduce, in contrast to the common unregularized approach, a well-defined Kohn-Sham iteration scheme. Convergence in a weak sense is then proven. This generalized formulation is applicable to a wide range of different density-functional theories and possibly even to models outside of quantum mechanics.