Hohenberg functional

Parr B 2000 webpage http //net.chem.unc.edu/facultv/rap/cfrap01. html Professor Parr was among the first to push the density functional theory of Hohenberg and Kohn to bring it into the mainstream of electronic structure theory. For a good overview, see the book ... 

The main difficulty with DFT is that the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem shows that the ground-state values of T,, V, etc. are all unique functionals of the ground-state p (i.e.. 

Hohenberg and Kohn demonstrated that is determined entirely by the (is a functional of) the electron density. In practice, E is usually approximated as an integral involving only the spin densities and possibly their gradients ... 

In Part 2 of their paper, Hohenberg and Kohn go on to investigate the form of the functional F[P(r)] in the special cases of certain limiting charge densities. They find that F[P(r)] can be expressed in terms of the correlation energy and electric polarizabilities. 

The fact that an exact density functional exists is known from a theorem proved by Hohenberg and Sham and Kohn. However, this is a non-constructive proof since it does not actually give the form of the exact functional. DFT theorists must try to approximate this functional as well as they can. 

Note in particular that the exchange-correlation functional that emCTges here does not involve the kinetic energy. From the perspective of the DFT literature, (3.16) is a formulation of the Hohenberg-Kohn functional that is constructed to ensure that the functional derivatives required for variational minimization actually exist. We return to these issues in Sect. 3.3. Also note that in the time-dependent case the external potential V(r, )is often considered to be explicitly... 

Instead of treating all electrons in the metal plus adsorbate system individually, one considers the electron density of the system. Hohenberg and Kohn (Kohn received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in this field) showed that the ground state Eq of a system is a unique functional of the electron density in its ground state Wq- Neglecting electron spin, the energy functional can be written as... 

Collecting the system independent parts into a new quantity, the Hohenberg-Kohn functional FHK[p0], we arrive at... 

Gorling, A., 1999, Density-Functional Theory Beyond the Hohenberg-Kohn Theorem , Phys. Rev. A, 59, 3359. 

The electron density of a non-degenerate ground state system determines essentially all physical properties of the system. This statement of the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem of Density Functional Theory plays an exceptionally important role among all the fundamental relations of Molecular Physics. 

These results, as most related results of density functional theory, have direct connections to the fundamental statement of the Hohenberg-Kohntheorem the nondegenerate ground state electron density p(r) of a molecule of n electrons in a local spin-independent external potential V, expressed in a spin-averaged form as... 

Density-functional theory, developed 25 years ago (Hohenberg and Kohn, 1964 Kohn and Sham, 1965) has proven very successful for the study of a wide variety of problems in solid state physics (for a review, see Martin, 1985). Interactions (beyond the Hartree potential) between electrons are described with an exchange and correlation potential, which is expressed as a functional of the charge density. For practical purposes, this functional needs to be approximated. The local-density approximation (LDA), in which the exchange and correlation potential at a particular point is only a function of the charge density at that same point, has been extensively tested and found to provide a reliable description of a wide variety of solid-state properties. Choices of numerical cutoff parameters or integration schemes that have to be made at various points in the density-functional calculations are all amenable to explicit covergence tests. 

The electronic wave function of an n-electron molecule is defined in 3n-dimensional configuration space, consistent with any conceivable molecular geometry. If the only aim is to characterize a molecule of fixed Born-Oppenheimer geometry the amount of information contained in the molecular wave function is therefore quite excessive. It turns out that the three-dimensional electron density function contains adequate information to uniquely determine the ground-state electronic properties of the molecule, as first demonstrated by Hohenberg and Kohn [104]. The approach is equivalent to the Thomas-Fermi model of an atom applied to molecules. 

According to a theorem by Hohenberg, Kohn and Sham [4], the total energy E of an electron gas can be written as a functional of the electronic density n(r) in the following form ... 

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