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In this paper, we propose a new numerical method to find the ground state energy of a given physical system within the Kohn–Sham density functional theory. The h‐adaptive finite element method is adopted for spatial discretization and implemented with matrix‐free operator evaluation. The ground state energy is found by performing unconstrained minimization with non‐orthogonal orbitals using the limited memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) method. A geometric multigrid preconditioner is applied to improve the convergence. The clear advantage of the proposed approach is demonstrated on selected examples by comparing the performance to other methods such as preconditioned steepest descent minimization. The proposed method provides a solid framework toward O(N) complexity for the locally adaptive real‐space solution of density functional theory with finite elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]