The pseudopotential

The first reliable energy band theories were based on a powerfiil approximation, call the pseudopotential approximation. Within this approximation, the all-electron potential corresponding to interaction of a valence electron with the iimer, core electrons and the nucleus is replaced by a pseudopotential. The pseudopotential reproduces only the properties of the outer electrons. There are rigorous theorems such as the Phillips-Kleinman cancellation theorem that can be used to justify the pseudopotential model [2, 3, 26]. The Phillips-Kleimnan cancellation theorem states that the orthogonality requirement of the valence states to the core states can be described by an effective repulsive... 

One can quantify the pseudopotential by writing the total crystalline potential for an elemental solid as... 

Since and depend only on die valence charge densities, they can be detennined once the valence pseudo- wavefiinctions are known. Because the pseudo-wavefiinctions are nodeless, the resulting pseudopotential is well defined despite the last temi in equation Al.3.78. Once the pseudopotential has been constructed from the atom, it can be transferred to the condensed matter system of interest. For example, the ionic pseudopotential defined by equation Al.3.78 from an atomistic calculation can be transferred to condensed matter phases without any significant loss of accuracy. 

There are complicating issues in defmmg pseudopotentials, e.g. the pseudopotential in equation Al.3.78 is state dependent, orbitally dependent and the energy and spatial separations between valence and core electrons are sometimes not transparent. These are not insunnoimtable issues. The state dependence is usually weak and can be ignored. The orbital dependence requires different potentials for different angular momentum components. This can be incorporated via non-local operators. The distinction between valence and core states can be addressed by incorporating the core level in question as part of the valence shell. For... 

There are a variety of other approaches to understanding the electronic structure of crystals. Most of them rely on a density functional approach, with or without the pseudopotential, and use different bases. For example, instead of a plane wave basis, one might write a basis composed of atomic-like orbitals ... 

An approach closely related to the pseudopotential is the orthogonalizedplane wave method [29]. In this method, the basis is taken to be as follows ... 

The pseudopotential is derived from an all-electron SIC-LDA atomic potential. The relaxation correction takes into account the relaxation of the electronic system upon the excitation of an electron [44]- The authors speculate that ... the ability of the SIRC potential to produce considerably better band structures than DFT-LDA may reflect an extra nonlocality in the SIRC pseudopotential, related to the nonlocality or orbital dependence in the SIC all-electron potential. In addition, it may mimic some of the energy and the non-local space dependence of the self-energy operator occurring in the GW approximation of the electronic many body problem [45]. 

The projector augmented-wave (PAW) DFT method was invented by Blochl to generalize both the pseudopotential and the LAPW DFT teclmiques [M]- PAW, however, provides all-electron one-particle wavefiinctions not accessible with the pseudopotential approach. The central idea of the PAW is to express the all-electron quantities in tenns of a pseudo-wavefiinction (easily expanded in plane waves) tenn that describes mterstitial contributions well, and one-centre corrections expanded in tenns of atom-centred fiinctions, that allow for the recovery of the all-electron quantities. The LAPW method is a special case of the PAW method and the pseudopotential fonnalism is obtained by an approximation. Comparisons of the PAW method to other all-electron methods show an accuracy similar to the FLAPW results and an efficiency comparable to plane wave pseudopotential calculations [, ]. PAW is also fonnulated to carry out DFT dynamics, where the forces on nuclei and wavefiinctions are calculated from the PAW wavefiinctions. (Another all-electron DFT molecular dynamics teclmique using a mixed-basis approach is applied in [84].)... 

Heine V 1970. The Pseudopotential Concept. Solid State Physics 24 1-36. 

The pseudopotential density-functional technique is used to calculate total energies, forces on atoms and stress tensors as described in Ref. 13 and implemented in the computer code CASTEP. CASTEP uses a plane-wave basis set to expand wave-functions and a preconditioned conjugate gradient scheme to solve the density-functional theory (DFT) equations iteratively. Brillouin zone integration is carried out via the special points scheme by Monkhorst and Pack. The nonlocal pseudopotentials in Kleynman-Bylander form were optimized in order to achieve the best convergence with respect to the basis set size. 5... 

Table 2 shows that in the case of ratile the GGA overestimation of lattice constants is less important in the present calculation than in Ref. 3. Most likely explanation is that the GGA functional is used here only for solid state calculations and not for the pseudopotential generation from the free atom. This procedure has been shown to give more accurate structural results than with the GGA applied both in the potential generation and solid state... 

The Car-Parrinello simulations were performed using the MOTECC-90 computer code [13]. All considered systems consist of 64 atoms in a cubic unit cell with a length of 23.4 a.u. and periodic boundary conditions. The plane-wave cut-off was chosen to be 6 Ryd. The atomic cores were described by the pseudopotentials of Bachelet et al. [14]. 

The obtained static structure factors agree well with the experimental ones [4], all trends of the peak positions are reproduced correctly. There are only small deviations from the experiments (i) due to the pseudopotential (slighly too small bond lengths which correspond to slightly too large peak positions in the reciprocal lattice) and (ii) correct positions but a wrong trend in the heights of the prepeaks. For a detailed description see Ref. [7]. 

The basic idea of the pseudopotential theory is to replace the strong electron-ion potential by a much weaker potential - a pseudopotential that can describe the salient features of the valence electrons which determine most physical properties of molecules to a much greater extent than the core electrons do. Within the pseudopotential approximation, the core electrons are totally ignored and only the behaviour of the valence electrons outside the core region is considered as important and is described as accurately as possible [54]. Thus the core electrons and the strong ionic potential are replaced by a much weaker pseudopotential which acts on the associated valence pseudo wave functions rather than the real valence wave functions (p ). As... 

All calculations are scalar relativistic calculations using the Douglas-Kroll Hamiltonian except for the CC calculations for the neutral atoms Ag and Au, where QCISD(T) within the pseudopotential approach was used [99], CCSD(T) results for Ag and Au are from Sadlej and co-workers, and Cu and Cu from our own work, using an uncontracted (21sl9plld6f4g) basis set for Cu [6,102] and a full active orbital space. 

To summarize, the RPPA is a method that can accurately describe relativistic effects, even though the relativistic perturbation operator used in the pseudopotential procedure is acting on the valence space and not the region dose to the nudeus, as this is the case for the correct all-electron relativistic perturbation operator. That is, relativistic effects are completely transferred into the valence space. These effects are also completely transferable from the atomic to the molecular case as the results for Au2 show. If relativistic pseudopotentials are carefully adjusted, they can produce results with errors much smaller than the errors originating from basis set incompleteness, basis set superposition or from the electron correlation procedure applied. 

Schwerdtfeger, P., Fischer, T Dolg, M Igel-Mann, G., Nicklass, A., Stoll, H. and Haaland, A. (1995) The Accuracy of the Pseudopotential Approximation. 1. An Analysis of the Spectroscopic Constants for the Electronic Ground States of InCl and InCh. Journal of Chemical Physics, 102, 2050-2062. 

Although the pseudopotential is, from its definition, a nonlocal operator, it is often represented approximately as a multiplicative potential. Parameters in some chosen functional form for this potential are chosen so that calculations of some physical properties, using this potential, give results agreeing with experiment. It is often the case that many properties can be calculated correctly with the same potential.43 One of the simplest forms for an atomic model effective potential is that of Ashcroft44 r l0(r — Rc), where the parameter is the core radius Rc and 6 is a step-function. 

For simple monovalent metals, the pseudopotential interaction between ion cores and electrons is weak, leading to a uniform density for the conduction electrons in the interior, as would obtain if there were no point ions, but rather a uniform positive background. The arrangement of ions is determined by the ion-electron and interionic forces, but the former have no effect if the electrons are uniformly distributed. As the interionic forces are mainly coulombic, it is not surprising that the alkali metals crystallize in a body-centered cubic lattice, which is the lattice with the smallest Madelung energy for a given density.46 Diffraction measurements... 

Fig. 17.8 Illustration of the trapping principle in an ion trap. The effect of rotating the saddle potential in part (a) is a pseudopotential well illustrated in part (b). For particles with suitable mass (and charge) the particle motion in the pseudopotential is indicated by the black line. The motion is a combination of a secular motion in the pseudopotential well and a small amplitude micromotion at the frequency of rotation mf. If the particle motion is damped, the particle can come to rest at the bottom of the well...

The empirical approach [7] was by far the most fruitful first attempt. The idea was to fit a few Fourier coefficients or form factors of the potential. This approach assumed that the pseudopotential could be represented accurately with around three Fourier form factors for each element and that the potential contained both the electron-core and electron-electron interactions. The form factors were generally fit to optical properties. This approach, called the Empirical Pseudopotential Method (EPM), gave [7] extremely accurate energy band structures and wave functions, and applications were made to a large number of solids, especially semiconductors. [8] In fact, it is probably fair to say that the electronic band structure problem and optical properties in the visible and UV for the standard semiconductors was solved in the 1960s and 1970s by the EPM. Before the EPM, even the electronic structure of Si, which was and is the prototype semiconductor, was only partially known. 

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