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This paper clarifies why long-range corrected (LC) density functional theory gives orbital energies quantitatively. First, the highest occupied molecular orbital and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energies of typical molecules are compared with the minus vertical ionization potentials (IPs) and electron affinities (EAs), respectively. Consequently, only LC exchange functionals are found to give the orbital energies close to the minus IPs and EAs, while other functionals considerably underestimate them. The reproducibility of orbital energies is hardly affected by the difference in the short-range part of LC functionals. Fractional occupation calculations are then carried out to clarify the reason for the accurate orbital energies of LC functionals. As a result, only LC functionals are found to keep the orbital energies almost constant for fractional occupied orbitals. The direct orbital energy dependence on the fractional occupation is expressed by the exchange self-interaction (SI) energy through the potential derivative of the exchange functional plus the Coulomb SI energy. On the basis of this, the exchange SI energies through the potential derivatives are compared with the minus Coulomb SI energy. Consequently, these are revealed to be cancelled out only by LC functionals except for H, He, and Ne atoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a direct method for reducing the dimension of the space of orbital products that occur, for example, in the calculation of time dependent density functional theory linear response and in Hedin’s GW approximation to the electron propagator. We do this by defining, within the linear space of orbital products, a subspace of dominant directions that are associated with a certain eigenvalue problem. These directions span the entire linear space of products with an error that decreases approximately exponentially with their number. Our procedure works best for atomic orbitals of finite range and it avoids the use of extra sets of auxiliary fit functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key characteristics of electronic excitations of many-electron systems, the excitation energies ωα and the oscillator strengths fα, can be obtained from linear response theory. In one-electron models and within the adiabatic approximation, the zeros of the inverse response matrix, which occur at the excitation energies, can be obtained from a simple diagonalization. Particular cases are the eigenvalue equations of time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), time-dependent density matrix functional theory, and the recently developed phase-including natural orbital (PINO) functional theory. In this paper, an expression for the oscillator strengths fα of the electronic excitations is derived within adiabatic response PINO theory. The fα are expressed through the eigenvectors of the PINO inverse response matrix and the dipole integrals. They are calculated with the phase-including natural orbital functional for two-electron systems adapted from the work of Lowdin and Shull on two-electron systems (the phase-including Löwdin-Shull functional). The PINO calculations reproduce the reference fα values for all considered excitations and bond distances R of the prototype molecules H2 and HeH+ very well (perfectly, if the correct choice of the phases in the functional is made). Remarkably, the quality is still very good when the response matrices are severely restricted to almost TDDFT size, i.e., involving in addition to the occupied-virtual orbital pairs just (HOMO+1)-virtual pairs (R1) and possibly (HOMO+2)-virtual pairs (R2). The shape of the curves fα(R) is rationalized with a decomposition analysis of the transition dipole moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the original Kohn-Sham (KS) formalism, we propose a density functional theory (DFT) with fractional orbital occupations for the study of ground states of many-electron systems, wherein strong static correlation is shown to be described. Even at the simplest level represented by the local density approximation (LDA), our resulting DFT-LDA is shown to improve upon KS-LDA for multi-reference systems, such as dissociation of H2 and N2, and twisted ethylene, while performing similar to KS-LDA for single-reference systems, such as reaction energies and equilibrium geometries. Because of its computational efficiency (similar to KS-LDA), this DFT-LDA is applied to the study of the singlet-triplet energy gaps (ST gaps) of acenes, which are 'challenging problems' for conventional electronic structure methods due to the presence of strong static correlation effects. Our calculated ST gaps are in good agreement with the existing experimental and high-level ab initio data. The ST gaps are shown to decrease monotonically with the increase of chain length, and become vanishingly small (within 0.1 kcal/mol) in the limit of an infinitely large polyacene. In addition, based on our calculated active orbital occupation numbers, the ground states for large acenes are shown to be polyradical singlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissociative electron attachment to dialanine and alanine anhydride has been studied in the gas phase utilizing a double focusing two sector field mass spectrometer. We show that low-energy electrons (i.e., electrons with kinetic energies from near zero up to 13 eV) attach to these molecules and subsequently dissociate to form a number of anionic fragments. Anion efficiency curves are recorded for the most abundant anions by measuring the ion yield as a function of the incident electron energy. The present experiments show that as for single amino acids (M), e.g., glycine, alanine, valine, and proline, the dehydrogenated closed shell anion (M-H)- is the most dominant reaction product. The interpretation of the experiments is aided by quantum chemical calculations based on density functional theory, by which the electrostatic potential and molecular orbitals are calculated and the initial electron attachment process prior to dissociation is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupied-orbital dependent (OOD) exchange-correlation functionals hold a particularly prominent place in current developments of density functional theory. Their self-consistent implementation is complicated by the fact that their orbital-dependent parts are not explicit but only implicit functionals of electron density, and the exchange-correlation potential may not be obtained straightforwardly by taking the functional derivative with respect to the density. A two-step procedure is required, in which initially the functional derivatives with respect to the orbitals (FDOs) are obtained, which may then be transformed into local and multiplicative potentials by techniques of the optimized-effective potential. In view of the rather large variety of OOD functionals under current study, we report here general, systematic, and transparent expressions of the FDOs of a generalized OOD functional and additionally a matrix-element version in a basis set of atomic orbitals. Explicit FDOs are for the first time derived and numerically tested for one of the currently most complex examples of an OOD functional, Becke’s real-space model of nondynamical correlation (B05 functional) [J. Chem. Phys. 122, 064101 (2005)]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recently proposed series of corrections to the earliest JK-only functionals has considerably improved the prospects of density matrix functional theory (DMFT). Still, the most advanced of these functionals (correction C3) requires a preselection of the terms in the pair density Γ(r1,r2) involving the bonding and antibonding natural orbitals (NOs) belonging to an electron pair bond. Ideally, a DMFT functional should only depend on the NOs and their occupation numbers, and we propose a functional with an occupation number driven weighing of terms in the pair density. These are formulated as “damping” for certain ranges of occupation numbers of the two-electron cumulant that arises in the expansion of the two-particle density matrix of the paradigmatic two-electron system. This automatic version of C3, which we denote AC3, provides the correct dissociation limit for electron pair bonds and it excellently reproduces the potential energy curves of the multireference configuration interaction (MRCI) method for the dissociation of the electron pair bond in the series of the ten-electron hydrides CH4, NH3, H2O, and HF. AC3 reproduces closely the experimental equilibrium distances and at Re it yields correlation energies of the ten-electron systems with an average error in the absolute values of only 3.3% compared to the MRCI values. We stress the importance of treatment of strong correlation cases (NO occupation numbers differing significantly from 2.0 and 0.0) by appropriate terms in the cumulant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exactly solvable lattice model describing a binary solution is considered where rodlike molecules of types AA and BB cover the links of a honeycomb lattice, the neighboring molecular ends having three-body and orientation-dependent bonding interactions. At phase coexistence of AA-rich and BB-rich phases, the average fraction of each type of triangle of neighboring molecular ends is calculated exactly. The fractions of the different types of triangles are then used to deduce the local microscopic structure of the coexisting phases for a case of the model that contains two closed loops in the phase diagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-component quasirelativistic approaches are in principle capable of reproducing results from fully relativistic calculations based on the four-component Dirac equation (with fixed particle number). For one-electron systems, this also holds in practice, but in many-electron systems one has to transform the two-electron interaction, which is necessary because a picture change occurs when going from the Dirac equation to a two-component method. For one-electron properties, one can take full account of picture change in a manageable way, but for the electron interaction, this would spoil the computational advantages which are the main reason to perform quasirelativistic calculations. Exploiting those picture change effects are largest in the atomic cores, which in molecular applications do not differ too much from the cores of isolated neutral atoms, we propose an elegant, efficient, and accurate approximation to the two-electron picture change problem. The new approach, called the “model potential” approach because it makes use of atomic (four- and two-component) data to estimate picture change effects in molecules, shares with the nuclear-only approach that the Douglas-Kroll operator needs to be constructed only once (not in each self-consistent-field iteration) and that no time-consuming multicenter relativistic two-electron integrals need to be calculated. The new approach correctly describes the screening of both the nearest nucleus and distant nuclei, for the scalar-relativistic as well as the spin-orbit parts of the Hamiltonian. The approach is tested on atomic and molecular-orbital energies as well as spectroscopic constants of the lead dimer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an interpretation of the intermolecular transfer integral that is independent from the origin of the energy scale allowing convergence studies of this important parameter of organic molecular materials. We present extensive numerical studies by using an ethylene π dimer to investigate the dependence of transfer integrals on the level of theory and intermolecular packing. Transfer integrals obtained from semiempirical calculations differ substantially from one another and from ab initio results. The ab initio results are consistent across all the levels used including Hartree–Fock, outer valence Green’s function, and various forms of density functional theory (DFT). Validation of transfer integrals and bandwidths is performed by comparing the calculated values with the experimental values of tetrathiafulvalene-tetracyanoquinodimethane (TTF-TCNQ), bis[1,2,5]thiadiazolo-p-quinobis(1,3-dithiole), (BTQBT) K-TCNQ, and hexagonal graphite. DFT in one of its presently popular forms, such as Perdew–Wang functionals (PW91), in combination with sufficient basis sets provides reliable transfer integrals, and therefore can serve as a basis for energy band calculations for soft organic materials with van der Waals gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electron momentum distributions for outer valence orbitals of CF2Cl2 have been obtained by (e,2e) electron momentum spectroscopy at an incident energy of 1200 eV+binding energy. The experimental electron momentum profiles are compared with Hartree–Fock and density functional theory (DFT) calculations using B3LYP hybrid functional with the 6-31G and 6-311+G* basis sets. Generally, the shapes of the experimental momentum profiles are well reproduced by DFT calculations using larger basis sets 6-311+G*. An attempt has been made to clarify the ordering of the outer valence orbitals, which have been in controversy, by comparing experimental results with B3LYP/6-311+G* calculations. © 2004 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]