Uniform electron gas approximation

Q rf [p(r)] is the Thomas-Fermi kinetic energy density with numerical coefficient ajp = 3(6jt ) / /5 derived within the uniform electron gas approximation... 

Density functional techniques are available for the calculation of the molecular and electronic structures of ground state systems. With the functionals available today, these compete with the best ab initio methods. This article focuses on the theoretical aspects associated with the Kohn Sham density functional procedure. While there is much room for improvement, the Kohn-Sham exchange-correlation functional offers a great opportunity for theoretical development without returning to the uniform electron gas approximation. Theoretical work in those areas will contribute significantly to the development of new, highly precise density functional methods. 

While the above discussion is instructive on how exchange interactions alone can lead to non-zero magnetization, this simple model is not adequate to describe reah-stic systems. There are several reasons for this, having to do with the limitations of both the Hartree-Fock approximation and the uniform electron gas approximation. First, the Hartree-Fock approximation is not realistic because of screening and... 

In the Local Density Approximation (LDA) it is assumed that the density locally can be treated as a uniform electron gas, or equivalently that the density is a slowly varying... 

To make matters worse, the use of a uniform gas model for electron density does not enable one to carry out good calculations. Instead a density gradient must be introduced into the uniform electron gas distribution. The way in which this has been implemented has typically been in a semi-empirical manner by working backwards from the known results on a particular atom, usually the helium atom (Gill, 1998). It has thus been possible to obtain an approximate set of functions which often serve to give successful approximations in other atoms and molecules. As far as I know, there is no known way of yet calculating, in an ab initio manner, the required density gradient which must be introduced into the calculations. 

In this section we introduce the model system on which virtually all approximate exchange-correlation functionals are based. At the center of this model is the idea of a hypothetical uniform electron gas. This is a system in which electrons move on a positive background charge distribution such that the total ensemble is electrically neutral. The number of elec-... 

Here, exc(p(r)) is the exchange-correlation energy per particle of a uniform electron gas of density p( ). This energy per particle is weighted with the probability p(r) that there is in fact an electron at this position in space. Writing Exc in this way defines the local density approximation, LDA for short. The quantity exc(p(r)) can be further split into exchange and correlation contributions,... 

The exchange part, ex, which represents the exchange energy of an electron in a uniform electron gas of a particular density is, apart from the pre-factor, equal to the form found by Slater in his approximation of the Hartree-Fock exchange (Section 3.3) and was originally derived by Bloch and Dirac in the late 1920 s ... 

This is a very drastic approximation since, after all, the density in our actual system is certainly anything but constant and does not even come close to the situation characteristic of the uniform electron gas. As a consequence, one might wonder whether results obtained with such a crude model will be of any value at all. Somewhat surprisingly then, experience tells us that the local (spin) density approximation is actually not that bad, but rather deliv-... 

The inherent problems associated with the computation of the properties of solids have been reduced by a computational technique called Density Functional Theory. This approach to the calculation of the properties of solids again stems from solid-state physics. In Hartree-Fock equations the N electrons need to be specified by 3/V variables, indicating the position of each electron in space. The density functional theory replaces these with just the electron density at a point, specified by just three variables. In the commonest formalism of the theory, due to Kohn and Sham, called the local density approximation (LDA), noninteracting electrons move in an effective potential that is described in terms of a uniform electron gas. Density functional theory is now widely used for many chemical calculations, including the stabilities and bulk properties of solids, as well as defect formation energies and configurations in materials such as silicon, GaN, and Agl. At present, the excited states of solids are not well treated in this way. 

The problem is that the exchange correlation functional Exc is unknown. Approximate forms have to be used. The most well-known is the local density approximation (LDA) in which the expressions for a uniform electron gas are... 

Table I The essentially-exact PW92 exchange-correlation energy per electron (in hartree) in a spin-unpolarized = 0) uniform electron gas of density parameter (in bohr), and the deviation (in hartree) of other approximations from PW92. (1 hartree = 27.21 eV = 627.5 kcal/moi.]...

Table III The ratio of approximate to exact exchange energy per electron of a uniform electron gas. For the approximations listed in Tables I and II but not listed here, this ratio is exactly 1. The Becke-Roussel exchange functional is a non-empirical meta-GGA based upon the hydrogen atom.

As mentioned above, LSD yields a reasonable description of the exchange-correlation hole, because it satisfies several exact conditions. However, since the correlation hole satisfies a zero sum rule, the scale of the hole must be set by its value at some value of . The local approximation is most accurate at points near the electron. In fact, while not exact at m = 0, LSD is highly accurate there. Thus the on-top hole provides the missing link between the uniform electron gas and real atoms and molecules [18]. 

The solid curve was obtained from Yasuhara s expression for the on-top hole for a uniform electron gas [55]. The circles indicate the LSD values of /< (0)>- Their proximity to the uniform-gas curve indicates that the approximation... 

For the spin-unpolarized uniform electron gas, the LYP correlation energy functional reduces to that of Colie and Salvetti [58], on which LYP is based. McWeeny s work [59] may have contributed to the widespread misimpression that the Colle-Salvetti functional is accurate in this limit. Note however the McWeeny tested Eq. (9) of Ref. [58], and not the further-approximated Eq. (19) of Ref. [58], which is the basis of LYP and other Colle-Salvetti applications, and which is shown in Table 2. 

In the remainder of this section, we give a brief overview of some of the functionals that are most widely used in plane-wave DFT calculations by examining each of the different approaches identified in Fig. 10.2 in turn. The simplest approximation to the true Kohn-Sham functional is the local density approximation (LDA). In the LDA, the local exchange-correlation potential in the Kohn-Sham equations [Eq. (1.5)] is defined as the exchange potential for the spatially uniform electron gas with the same density as the local electron density ... 

Density functional approaches to molecular electronic structure rely on the existence theorem [10] of a universal functional of the electron density. Since this theorem does not provide any direction as to how such a functional should be constructed, the functionals in existence are obtained by relying on various physical models, such as the uniform electron gas and others. In particular, the construction of an exchange-correlation potential that depends on the electron density only locally seems impossible without some approximations. Such approximate exchange-correlation potentials have been derived and applied with some success for the description of molecular electronic ground states and their properties. However, there is no credible evidence that such simple constructions can lead to either systematic approximate treatments, or an exact description of molecular electronic properties. The exact functional that seems to... 

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