Exchange-correlation energy approximation definition

The formal definition of the exchange-correlation energy by Eq. (22) is not very helpful for designing approximate density functionals. Fortunately, there exist more constructive exact formulas for Fxcip]- Observe that by the Hellmann-Feynman theorem [41]... 

Table II presents the first excitation energies obtained from spin- polarized calculations [24]. As ground-state exchange-correlation potentials were used the extra term in Eq.(20) does not appear. This is, certainly, one of the reasons for the difference between the calculated and the experimental excitation energies. There is a definite improvement comparing with the nonspin-polarized results [13]. Still, in most cases the calculated excitation energies are highly overestimated. The results provided by the different local density approximations are quite close to each other. The best one seems to be the Gunnarson-Lundqvist-Wilkins approximation. (In non-spin-polarized case the Perdew-Zunger parametrization gives results closest to the experimental data[30].)...

The definitions (1.65) and (1.68) are formal ones, and do not provide much intuitive or physical insight into the exchange and correlation energies, or much guidance for the approximation of their density functionals. These insights are provided by the coupling-constant integration [30,31,32,33] to be derived below. 

HJ point out that in the detailed work on H2 by Kolos and Wolniewicz,114 the first excited state 3 2 was found to have a very weak minimum at a large separation. This binding presumably arises from a van der Waals force which is not included in the density functional theory when a local approximation to exchange and correlation is employed. Nevertheless, as HJ point out, their study of the corresponding state of the dimers Li2-Cs2 revealed a weak, but definite maximum in each case. Rough estimates of binding energy and equilibrium separation are shown in Table 16. It is, of course, possible that these results are a consequence of the local spin-density approximation, so that further work will... 

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