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We propose an unconditionally energy-stable, orthonormality-preserving, component-wise splitting iterative scheme for the Kohn-Sham gradient flow based model in the electronic structure calculation. We first study the scheme discretized in time but still continuous in space. The component-wise splitting iterative scheme changes one wave function at a time, similar to the Gauss-Seidel iteration for solving a linear equation system. At the time step n , the orthogonality of the wave function being updated to other wave functions is preserved by projecting the gradient of the Kohn-Sham energy onto the subspace orthogonal to all other wave functions known at the current time, while the normalization of this wave function is preserved by projecting the gradient of the Kohn-Sham energy onto the subspace orthogonal to this wave function at t n + 1 / 2. The unconditional energy stability is nontrivial, and it comes from a subtle treatment of the two-electron integral as well as a consistent treatment of the two projections. Rigorous mathematical derivations are presented to show our proposed scheme indeed satisfies the desired properties. We then study the fully-discretized scheme, where the space is further approximated by a conforming finite element subspace. For the fully-discretized scheme, not only the preservation of orthogonality and normalization (together we called orthonormalization) can be quickly shown using the same idea as for the semi-discretized scheme, but also the highlight property of the scheme, i.e., the unconditional energy stability can be rigorously proven. The scheme allows us to use large time step sizes and deal with small systems involving only a single wave function during each iteration step. Several numerical experiments are performed to verify the theoretical analysis, where the number of iterations is indeed greatly reduced as compared to similar examples solved by the Kohn-Sham gradient flow based model in the literature. • This paper proposes a novel and efficient numerical scheme for the Kohn-Sham gradient flow based model. • The scheme is an unconditionally energy-stable, orthonormality-preserving, component-wise splitting iterative scheme. • The scheme does not modify the original energy, allows large time step sizes, and solves small systems at each time step. • The rigorous proof is presented in the paper. • Several numerical examples are illustrated to verify the theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an adaptive finite element method is proposed for solving Kohn–Sham equation with the multilevel correction technique. In the method, the Kohn–Sham equation is solved on a fixed and appropriately coarse mesh with the finite element method in which the finite element space is kept improving by solving the derived boundary value problems on a series of adaptively and successively refined meshes. A main feature of the method is that solving large scale Kohn–Sham system is avoided effectively, and solving the derived boundary value problems can be handled efficiently by classical methods such as the multigrid method. Hence, the significant acceleration can be obtained on solving Kohn–Sham equation with the proposed multilevel correction technique. The performance of the method is examined by a variety of numerical experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, we have proposed the adaptive local basis set for electronic structure calculations based on Kohn–Sham density functional theory in a pseudopotential framework. The adaptive local basis set is efficient and systematically improvable for total energy calculations. In this paper, we present the calculation of atomic forces, which can be used for a range of applications such as geometry optimization and molecular dynamics simulation. We demonstrate that, under mild assumptions, the computation of atomic forces can scale nearly linearly with the number of atoms in the system using the adaptive local basis set. We quantify the accuracy of the Hellmann–Feynman forces for a range of physical systems, benchmarked against converged planewave calculations, and find that the adaptive local basis set is efficient for both force and energy calculations, requiring at most a few tens of basis functions per atom to attain accuracies required in practice. Since the adaptive local basis set has implicit dependence on atomic positions, Pulay forces are in general nonzero. However, we find that the Pulay force is numerically small and systematically decreasing with increasing basis completeness, so that the Hellmann–Feynman force is sufficient for basis sizes of a few tens of basis functions per atom. We verify the accuracy of the computed forces in static calculations of quasi-1D and 3D disordered Si systems, vibration calculation of a quasi-1D Si system, and molecular dynamics calculations of H 2 and liquid Al–Si alloy systems, where we show systematic convergence to benchmark planewave results and results from the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the development of a new exchange–correlation functional from the point of view of machine learning. Using atomization energies of solids and small molecules, we train a linear model for the exchange enhancement factor using a Bayesian approach which allows for the quantification of uncertainties in the predictions. A relevance vector machine is used to automatically select the most relevant terms of the model. We then test this model on atomization energies and also on bulk properties. The average model provides a mean absolute error of only 0.116 eV for the test points of the G2/97 set but a larger 0.314 eV for the test solids. In terms of bulk properties, the prediction for transition metals and monovalent semiconductors has a very low test error. However, as expected, predictions for types of materials not represented in the training set such as ionic solids show much larger errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address the problem of computing the numerical solution to kinetic partial differential equations involving many phase variables. These types of equations arise naturally in many different areas of mathematical physics, e.g., in particle systems (Liouville and Boltzmann equations), stochastic dynamical systems (Fokker–Planck and Dostupov–Pugachev equations), random wave theory (Malakhov–Saichev equations) and coarse-grained stochastic systems (Mori–Zwanzig equations). We propose three different classes of new algorithms addressing high-dimensionality: The first one is based on separated series expansions resulting in a sequence of low-dimensional problems that can be solved recursively and in parallel by using alternating direction methods. The second class of algorithms relies on truncation of interaction in low-orders that resembles the Bogoliubov–Born–Green–Kirkwood–Yvon (BBGKY) framework of kinetic gas theory and it yields a hierarchy of coupled probability density function equations. The third class of algorithms is based on high-dimensional model representations, e.g., the ANOVA method and probabilistic collocation methods. A common feature of all these approaches is that they are reducible to the problem of computing the solution to high-dimensional equations via a sequence of low-dimensional problems. The effectiveness of the new algorithms is demonstrated in numerical examples involving nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems and partial differential equations, with up to 120 variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In order to simulate quantum N-body systems, stationary and time-dependent density functional theories rely on the capacity of calculating the single-electron wave-functions of a system from which one obtains the total electron density (Kohn–Sham systems). In this paper, we introduce the use of the Wigner Monte Carlo method in ab-initio calculations. This approach allows time-dependent simulations of chemical systems in the presence of reflective and absorbing boundary conditions. It also enables an intuitive comprehension of chemical systems in terms of the Wigner formalism based on the concept of phase-space. Finally, being based on a Monte Carlo method, it scales very well on parallel machines paving the way towards the time-dependent simulation of very complex molecules. A validation is performed by studying the electron distribution of three different systems, a Lithium atom, a Boron atom and a hydrogenic molecule. For the sake of simplicity, we start from initial conditions not too far from equilibrium and show that the systems reach a stationary regime, as expected (despite no restriction is imposed in the choice of the initial conditions). We also show a good agreement with the standard density functional theory for the hydrogenic molecule. These results demonstrate that the combination of the Wigner Monte Carlo method and Kohn–Sham systems provides a reliable computational tool which could, eventually, be applied to more sophisticated problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• The real part of the star-genvalue problem corresponds to an eigenvalue problem in the Wigner formalism. • The imaginary part of the star-genvalue problem corresponds to the stationary Wigner equation. • The eigenvalue problem can be solved via the method of imaginary time propagation (ITP). • The stationary Wigner equation can be used to accelerate the convergence of ITP. • The Hermite spectral method turns out to be efficient in the numerical simulations. In this paper, the ground state Wigner function of a many-body system is explored theoretically and numerically. First, an eigenvalue problem for Wigner function is derived based on the energy operator of the system. The validity of finding the ground state through solving this eigenvalue problem is obtained by building a correspondence between its solution and the solution of stationary Schrödinger equation. Then, a numerical method is designed for solving proposed eigenvalue problem in one dimensional case, which can be briefly described by i) a simplified model is derived based on a quantum hydrodynamic model Cai et al. (2013) [7] to reduce the dimension of the problem, ii) an imaginary time propagation method is designed for solving the model, and numerical techniques such as solution reconstruction are proposed for the feasibility of the method. Results of several numerical experiments verify our method, in which the potential application of the method for large scale system is demonstrated by examples with density functional theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a parallel orbital-updating based optimization method for electronic structure calculations. With our method, the solution of the minimization problem for the Kohn-Sham energy functional with respect to N orbitals is replaced by the solution of N independent minimization problems for the energy functional with respect to one orbital and the orthogonalization of the N updated orbitals. This new method allows a two-level parallelization. This feature makes our approach has a great advantage in large scale parallel computing. The numerical experiments show that our new method is reliable and efficient. Hence, our new method has a great potential for large scale electronic structure calculations on modern supercomputers. • Propose a parallel orbital-updating based optimization approach for KS model. • The new approach has a feature of two-level parallelization. • Provide two practical parallel orbital-updating based optimization algorithms. • Numerical experiments show that these new algorithms are reliable and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, a framework of using h-adaptive finite element method for the Kohn–Sham equation on the tetrahedron mesh is presented. The Kohn–Sham equation is discretized by the finite element method, and the h-adaptive technique is adopted to optimize the accuracy and the efficiency of the algorithm. The locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient method is employed for solving the generalized eigenvalue problem, and an algebraic multigrid preconditioner is used to accelerate the solver. A variety of numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for both the all-electron and the pseudo-potential calculations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We design a Kohn–Sham equation solver based on hexahedral finite element discretizations. The solver integrates three schemes proposed in this paper. The first scheme arranges one a priori locally-refined hexahedral mesh with appropriate multiresolution. The second one is a modified mass-lumping procedure which accelerates the diagonalization in the self-consistent field iteration. The third one is a finite element recovery method which enhances the eigenpair approximations with small extra work. We carry out numerical tests on each scheme to investigate the validity and efficiency, and then apply them to calculate the ground state total energies of nanosystems C60, C120, and C275H172. It is shown that our solver appears to be computationally attractive for finite element applications in electronic structure study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The power of density functional theory is often limited by the high computational demand in solving an eigenvalue problem at each self-consistent-field (SCF) iteration. The method presented in this paper replaces the explicit eigenvalue calculations by an approximation of the wanted invariant subspace, obtained with the help of well-selected Chebyshev polynomial filters. In this approach, only the initial SCF iteration requires solving an eigenvalue problem, in order to provide a good initial subspace. In the remaining SCF iterations, no iterative eigensolvers are involved. Instead, Chebyshev polynomials are used to refine the subspace. The subspace iteration at each step is easily five to ten times faster than solving a corresponding eigenproblem by the most efficient eigen-algorithms. Moreover, the subspace iteration reaches self-consistency within roughly the same number of steps as an eigensolver-based approach. This results in a significantly faster SCF iteration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Density functional theory (DFT) offers computationally affordable way of describing static and dynamic properties of superfluid 4He. In general, the DFT models yield single particle-like Schro¨dinger equations with a nonlinear potential term that accounts for all the many-body interactions. The resulting equations can be solved for small amplitude plane wave excitations in the bulk whereas fully numerical solution must be sought in more complicated cases. In this paper we propose a numerical method that can be used in solving the time-dependent nonlinear Schro¨dinger equation in both real and imaginary times. The method is based on operator splitting technique where each component operator is treated with a unitary semi-implicit Crank–Nicolson scheme. In order to increase the stability of the method for complex valued nonlinear potentials, a predict–correct scheme is employed in the simulations. The numerical calculations indicate that the scheme is numerically sufficiently stable and well behaving, exhibits high degree of parallelism, and produces results in agreement with the existing numerical data. In the numerical examples we apply the method to obtain dispersion relation of the bulk liquid and to calculate solvation and absorption spectrum of atomic boron solvated in superfluid helium. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]