Aristeidis Kroukis

Bio: Aristeidis Kroukis is an academic researcher from Durham University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Hartree–Fock method & Exchange operator. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 9 citations.

A correction for the Hartree-Fock density of states for jellium without screening

Abstract: We revisit the Hartree-Fock (HF) calculation for the uniform electron gas, or jellium model, whose predictions—divergent derivative of the energy dispersion relation and vanishing density of states (DOS) at the Fermi level—are in qualitative disagreement with experimental evidence for simple metals. Currently, this qualitative failure is attributed to the lack of screening in the HF equations. Employing Slater’s hyper-Hartree-Fock (HHF) equations, derived variationally, to study the ground state and the excited states of jellium, we find that the divergent derivative of the energy dispersion relation and the zero in the DOS are still present, but shifted from the Fermi wavevector and energy of jellium to the boundary between the set of variationally optimised and unoptimised HHF orbitals. The location of this boundary is not fixed, but it can be chosen to lie at arbitrarily high values of wavevector and energy, well clear from the Fermi level of jellium. We conclude that, rather than the lack of screening in the HF equations, the well-known qualitative failure of the ground-state HF approximation is an artifact of its nonlocal exchange operator. Other similar artifacts of the HF nonlocal exchange operator, not associated with the lack of electronic correlation, are known in the literature.

A correction for the Hartree-Fock Density of States for Jellium without Screening

Abstract: We revisit the Hartree-Fock (HF) calculation for the uniform electron gas, or jellium model, whose predictions -- divergent derivative of the energy dispersion relation and vanishing density of states (DOS) at the Fermi level -- are in qualitative disagreement with experimental evidence for simple metals. Currently, this qualitative failure is attributed to the lack of screening in the HF equations. Employing Slater's hyper-Hartree-Fock (HHF) equations, derived variationally, to study the ground state and the excited states of jellium, we find that the divergent derivative of the energy dispersion relation and the zero in the DOS are still present, but shifted from the Fermi wavevector and energy of jellium to the boundary between the set of variationally optimised and unoptimised HHF orbitals. The location of this boundary is not fixed, but it can be chosen to lie at arbitrarily high values of wavevector and energy, well clear from the Fermi level of jellium. We conclude that, rather than the lack of screening in the HF equations, the well-known qualitative failure of the ground-state HF approximation is an artifact of its nonlocal exchange operator. Other similar artifacts of the HF nonlocal exchange operator, not associated with the lack of electronic correlation, are known in the literature.

A local Fock-exchange potential in Kohn-Sham equations.

Abstract: We derive and employ a local potential to represent the Fock exchange operator in electronic single-particle equations. This local Fock-exchange (LFX) potential is very similar to the exact exchange (EXX) potential in density functional theory (DFT). The practical software implementation of the two potentials (LFX and EXX) yields robust and accurate results for a variety of systems (semiconductors, transition metal oxides) where Hartree–Fock and popular approximations of DFT typically fail. This includes examples traditionally considered qualitatively inaccessible to calculations that omit correlation.

Performance of the constrained minimization of the total energy in density functional approximations: the electron repulsion density and potential

Abstract: In the constrained minimization method of Gidopoulos and Lathiotakis [N.I. Gidopoulos, N.N. Lathiotakis, J. Chem. Phys. 136, 224109 (2012)], the Hartree exchange and correlation Kohn-Sham potential of a finite N-electron system is replaced by the electrostatic potential of an effective charge density that is everywhere positive and integrates to a charge of N − 1 electrons. The optimal effective charge density (electron repulsion density, ρrep) and the corresponding optimal effective potential (electron repulsion potential vrep) are obtained by minimizing the electronic total energy in any density functional approximation. The two constraints are sufficient to remove the self-interaction errors from vrep, correcting its asymptotic behavior at large distances from the system. In the present work, we describe, in complete detail, the constrained minimization method, including recent refinements. We also assess its performance in removing the self-interaction errors for three popular density functional approximations, namely LDA, PBE and B3LYP, by comparing the obtained ionization energies to their experimental values for an extended set of molecules. We show that the results of the constrained minimizations are almost independent of the specific approximation with average percentage errors 15%, 14%, 13% for the above DFAs respectively. These errors are substantially smaller than the corresponding errors of the plain (unconstrained) Kohn-Sham calculations at 38%, 39% and 27% respectively. Finally, we showed that this method correctly predicts negative values for the HOMO energies of several anions.

A local Fock-exchange potential in Kohn-Sham equations

Abstract: We derive and employ a local potential to represent the Fock exchange operator in electronic single-particle equations. This local Fock-exchange (LFX) potential is very similar to the exact exchange (EXX) potential in density functional theory (DFT). The practical software implementation of the two potentials (LFX and EXX) yields robust and accurate results for a variety of systems (semiconductors, transition metal oxides) where Hartree Fock and popular approximations of DFT typically fail. This includes examples traditionally considered qualitatively inaccessible to calculations that omit correlation.

Excitation Energies of Molecules from Ensemble Density Functional Theory: Multiconfiguration Approaches

Abstract: Ensemble methods for excited states are based on the ensemble variation principle and in their simplest formulations can be either based on the wavefunction or the electron density. The latter group shares the favorable scaling of ground state density functional theory (DFT) and as such can be considered a computationally inexpensive alternative to time-dependent (TD)-DFT in cases where TD-DFT is not sufficiently accurate. The failures of TD-DFT most prominently include the poor description of conical intersections and excitations of multiple character, i.e., when multiconfigurational effects play a significant role. To deal with such issues, quite recently a number of multiconfiguration ensemble methods have been designed that combine a wavefunction-based formulation with ensemble density functional theory. This chapter discusses the merits and shortcomings of such approaches. It also attempts to elucidate some of the essential problems associated with the ensemble DFT methods and their variants to the computational chemistry community.