No Arabic abstract
A new implementation of the GW approximation (GWA) based on the all-electron Projector-Augmented-Wave method (PAW) is presented, where the screened Coulomb interaction is computed within the Random Phase Approximation (RPA) instead of the plasmon-pole model. Two different ways of computing the self-energy are reported. The method is used successfully to determine the quasiparticle energies of six semiconducting or insulating materials: Si, SiC, AlAs, InAs, NaH and KH. To illustrate the novelty of the method the real and imaginary part of the frequency-dependent self-energy together with the spectral function of silicon are computed. Finally, the GWA results are compared with other calculations, highlighting that all-electron GWA results can differ markedly from those based on pseudopotential approaches.
We have implemented the so called GW approximation (GWA) based on an all-electron full-potential Projector Augmented Wave (PAW) method. For the screening of the Coulomb interaction W we tested three different plasmon-pole dielectric function models, and showed that the accuracy of the quasiparticle energies is not sensitive to the the details of these models. We have then applied this new method to compute the quasiparticle band structure of some small, medium and large-band-gap semiconductors: Si, GaAs, AlAs, InP, SiMg$_2$, C and (insulator) LiCl. A special attention was devoted to the convergence of the self-energy with respect to both the {bf k}-points in the Brillouin zone and to the number of reciprocal space $bf G$-vectors. The most important result is that although the all-electron GWA improves considerably the quasiparticle band structure of semiconductors, it does not always provide the correct energy band gaps as originally claimed by GWA pseudopotential type of calculations. We argue that the decoupling between the valence and core electrons is a problem, and is some what hidden in a pseudopotential type of approach.
We present a new all-electron, augmented-wave implementation of the GW approximation using eigenfunctions generated by a recent variant of the full-potential LMTO method. The dynamically screened Coulomb interaction W is expanded in a mixed basis set which consists of two contributions, local atom-centered functions confined to muffin-tin spheres, and plane waves with the overlap to the local functions projected out. The former can include any of the core states; thus the core and valence states can be treated on an equal footing. Systematic studies of semiconductors and insulators show that the GW fundamental bandgaps consistently fall low in comparison to experiment, and also the quasiparticle levels differ significantly from other, approximate methods, in particular those that approximate the core with a pseudopotential.
Organic electronics is a rapidly developing technology. Typically, the molecules involved in organic electronics are made up of hundreds of atoms, prohibiting a theoretical description by wavefunction-based ab-initio methods. Density-functional and Greens function type of methods scale less steeply with the number of atoms. Therefore, they provide a suitable framework for the theory of such large systems. In this contribution, we describe an implementation, for molecules, of Hedins GW approximation. The latter is the lowest order solution of a set of coupled integral equations for electronic Greens and vertex functions that was found by Lars Hedin half a century ago. Our implementation of Hedins GW approximation has two distinctive features: i) it uses sets of localized functions to describe the spatial dependence of correlation functions, and ii) it uses spectral functions to treat their frequency dependence. Using these features, we were able to achieve a favorable computational complexity of this approximation. In our implementation, the number of operations grows as N^3 with the number of atoms N.
We present first-principles calculations of the impact ionization rate (IIR) in the $GW$ approximation ($GW$A) for semiconductors. The IIR is calculated from the quasiparticle (QP) width in the $GW$A, since it can be identified as the decay rate of a QP into lower energy QP plus an independent electron-hole pair. The quasiparticle self-consistent $GW$ method was used to generate the noninteracting hamiltonian the $GW$A requires as input. Small empirical corrections were added so as to reproduce experimental band gaps. Our results are in reasonable agreement with previous work, though we observe some discrepancy. In particular we find high IIR at low energy in the narrow gap semiconductor InAs.
We apply a recently developed quasiparticle self-consistent $GW$ method (QSGW) to Gd, Er, EuN, GdN, ErAs, YbN and GdAs. We show that QSGW combines advantages separately found in conventional $GW$ and LDA+$U$ theory, in a simple and fully emph{ab initio} way. qsgw reproduces the experimental occupied $4f$ levels well, though unoccupied levels are systematically overestimated. Properties of the Fermi surface responsible for electronic properties are in good agreement with available experimental data. GdN is predicted to be very near a critical point of a first-order metal-insulator transition.