Electronic structure, Kohn-Sham

Belpassi, L., Tarantelli, E., Sgamellotti, A. and Quiney H.M. (2006) The Electronic Structure of Alkali Aurides. A Eour-ComponentDirac-Kohn-Sham Study. The journal of Physical Chemistry A, 110, 4543 554. 

The basic idea underlying AIMD is to compute the forces acting on the nuclei by use of quantum mechanical DFT-based calculations. In the Car-Parrinello method [10], the electronic degrees of freedom (as described by the Kohn-Sham orbitals y/i(r)) are treated as dynamic classical variables. In this way, electronic-structure calculations are performed on-the-fly as the molecular dynamics trajectory is generated. Car and Parrinello specified system dynamics by postulating a classical Lagrangian ... 

All these functional derivatives are well defined and do not involve any actual derivative relative to the electron number. It is remarkable that the derivatives of the Kohn-Sham chemical potential /rs gives the so-called radical Fukui function [8] either in a frozen orbital approximation or by including the relaxation of the KS band structure. On the other hand, the derivative of the Kohn-Sham HOMO-FUMO gap (defined here as a positive quantity) is the so-called nonlinear Fukui function fir) [26,32,50] also called Fukui difference [51]. 

Most practical electronic structure calculations using density functional theory [1] involve solving the Kohn-Sham equations [2], The only unknown quantity in a Kohn-Sham spin-density functional calculation is the exchange-correlation energy (and its functional derivative) [2]... 

The basic concepts of the one-electron Kohn-Sham theory have been presented and the structure, properties and approximations of the Kohn-Sham exchange-correlation potential have been overviewed. The discussion has been focused on the most recent developments in the theory, such as the construction of from the correlated densities, the methods to obtain total energy and energy differences from the potential, and the orbital dependent approximations to v. The recent achievements in analysis of the atomic shell and molecular bond midpoint structure of have been... 

In order to better understand the structure of the potential we must calculate the functional derivative of the Kohn-Sham pair-correlation function. This function describes the sensitivity of the exchange screening between two electrons at and rj to density changes at point ra. One property of this... 

In the next section we shall recall the definitions of the chemical concepts relevant to this paper in the framework of DFT. In Section 3 we briefly review Strutinsky s averaging procedure and its formulation in the extended Kohn-Sham (EKS) scheme. The following section is devoted to the presentation and discussion of our results for the residual, shell-structure part of the ionization potential, electron affinity, electronegativity, and chemical hardness for the series of atoms from B to Ca. The last section will present some conclusions. 

All electron calculations were carried out with the DFT program suite Turbomole (152,153). The clusters were treated as open-shell systems in the unrestricted Kohn-Sham framework. For the calculations we used the Becke-Perdew exchange-correlation functional dubbed BP86 (154,155) and the hybrid B3LYP functional (156,157). For BP86 we invoked the resolution-of-the-iden-tity (RI) approximation as implemented in Turbomole. For all atoms included in our models we employed Ahlrichs valence triple-C TZVP basis set with polarization functions on all atoms (158). If not noted otherwise, initial guess orbitals were obtained by extended Hiickel theory. Local spin analyses were performed with our local Turbomole version, where either Lowdin (131) or Mulliken (132) pseudo-projection operators were employed. Broken-symmetry determinants were obtained with our restrained optimization tool (136). Pictures of molecular structures were created with Pymol (159). 

A number of different methods have been proposed to introduce a self-interaction correction into the Kohn-Sham formalism (Perdew and Zunger 1981 KUmmel and Perdew 2003 Grafenstein, Kraka, and Cremer 2004). This correction is particularly useful in situations with odd numbers of electrons distributed over more than one atom, e.g., in transition-state structures (Patchkovskii and Ziegler 2002). Unfortunately, the correction introduces an additional level of self-consistency into the KS SCF process because it depends on the KS orbitals, and it tends to be difficult and time-consuming to converge the relevant equations. However, future developments in non-local correlation functionals may be able to correct for self-interaction error in a more efficient manner. 

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