No Arabic abstract
In high temperature density functional theory simulations (from tens of eV to keV) the total number of Kohn-Sham orbitals is a critical quantity to get accurate results. To establish the relationship between the number of orbitals and the level of occupation of the highest orbital, we derived a model based on the electron gas properties at finite temperature. This model predicts the total number of orbitals required to reach a given level of occupation and thus a stipulated precision. Levels of occupation as low as 10-4, and below, must be considered to get converged results better than 1%, making high temperature simulations very time consuming beyond a few tens of eV. After assessing the predictions of the model against previous results and ABINIT minimizations, we show how the extended FPMD method of Zhang et al. [PoP 23 042707, 2016] allows to bypass these strong constraints on the number of orbitals at high temperature.
Deriving accurate energy density functional is one of the central problems in condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and quantum chemistry. We propose a novel method to deduce the energy density functional by combining the idea of the functional renormalization group and the Kohn-Sham scheme in density functional theory. The key idea is to solve the renormalization group flow for the effective action decomposed into the mean-field part and the correlation part. Also, we propose a simple practical method to quantify the uncertainty associated with the truncation of the correlation part. By taking the $varphi^4$ theory in zero dimension as a benchmark, we demonstrate that our method shows extremely fast convergence to the exact result even for the highly strong coupling regime.
Understanding many processes, e.g. fusion experiments, planetary interiors and dwarf stars, depends strongly on microscopic physics modeling of warm dense matter (WDM) and hot dense plasma. This complex state of matter consists of a transient mixture of degenerate and nearly-free electrons, molecules, and ions. This regime challenges both experiment and analytical modeling, necessitating predictive emph{ab initio} atomistic computation, typically based on quantum mechanical Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory (KS-DFT). However, cubic computational scaling with temperature and system size prohibits the use of DFT through much of the WDM regime. A recently-developed stochastic approach to KS-DFT can be used at high temperatures, with the exact same accuracy as the deterministic approach, but the stochastic error can converge slowly and it remains expensive for intermediate temperatures (<50 eV). We have developed a universal mixed stochastic-deterministic algorithm for DFT at any temperature. This approach leverages the physics of KS-DFT to seamlessly integrate the best aspects of these different approaches. We demonstrate that this method significantly accelerated self-consistent field calculations for temperatures from 3 to 50 eV, while producing stable molecular dynamics and accurate diffusion coefficients.
We present a numerical modeling workflow based on machine learning (ML) which reproduces the the total energies produced by Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT) at finite electronic temperature to within chemical accuracy at negligible computational cost. Based on deep neural networks, our workflow yields the local density of states (LDOS) for a given atomic configuration. From the LDOS, spatially-resolved, energy-resolved, and integrated quantities can be calculated, including the DFT total free energy, which serves as the Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surface for the atoms. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach for both solid and liquid metals and compare results between independent and unified machine-learning models for solid and liquid aluminum. Our machine-learning density functional theory framework opens up the path towards multiscale materials modeling for matter under ambient and extreme conditions at a computational scale and cost that is unattainable with current algorithms.
We construct exact Kohn-Sham potentials for the ensemble density-functional theory (EDFT) from the ground and excited states of helium. The exchange-correlation (XC) potential is compared with the quasi-local-density approximation and both single determinant and symmetry eigenstate ghost-corrected exact exchange approximations. Symmetry eigenstate Hartree-exchange recovers distinctive features of the exact XC potential and is used to calculate the correlation potential. Unlike the exact case, excitation energies calculated from these approximations depend on ensemble weight, and it is shown that only the symmetry eigenstate method produces an ensemble derivative discontinuity. Differences in asymptotic and near-ground-state behavior of exact and approximate XC potentials are discussed in the context of producing accurate optical gaps.
We develop a density functional treatment of non-interacting abelian anyons, which is capable, in principle, of dealing with a system of a large number of anyons in an external potential. Comparison with exact results for few particles shows that the model captures the behavior qualitatively and semi-quantitatively, especially in the vicinity of the fermionic statistics. We then study anyons with statistics parameter $1+1/n$, which are thought to condense into a superconducting state. An indication of the superconducting behavior is the mean-field result that, for uniform density systems, the ground state energy increases under the application of an external magnetic field independent of its direction. Our density-functional-theory based analysis does not find that to be the case for finite systems of anyons, which can accommodate a weak external magnetic field through density transfer between the bulk and the boundary rather than through transitions across effective Landau levels, but the Meissner repulsion of the external magnetic field is recovered in the thermodynamic limit as the effect of the boundary becomes negligible. We also consider the quantum Hall effect of anyons, and show that its topological properties, such as the charge and statistics of the excitations and the quantized Hall conductance, arise in a self-consistent fashion.