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For chemistry an accurate description of bond weakening and breaking is vital. The great advantage of density matrix functionals, as opposed to density functionals, is their ability to describe such processes since they naturally cover both nondynamical and dynamical correlation. This is obvious in the Löwdin-Shull functional, the exact natural orbital functional for two-electron systems. We present in this paper extensions of this functional for the breaking of a single electron pair bond in N-electron molecules, using LiH, BeH+, and Li2 molecules as prototypes. Attention is given to the proper formulation of the functional in terms of not just J and K integrals but also the two-electron L integrals (K integrals with a different distribution of the complex conjugation of the orbitals), which is crucial for the calculation of response functions. Accurate energy curves are obtained with extended Löwdin-Shull functionals along the complete dissociation coordinate using full CI calculations as benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adiabatic approximation is problematic in time-dependent density matrix functional theory. With pure density matrix functionals (invariant under phase change of the natural orbitals) it leads to lack of response in the occupation numbers, hence wrong frequency dependent responses, in particular α(ω→0)≠α0 (the static polarizability). We propose to relinquish the requirement that the functional must be a pure one-body reduced density matrix (1RDM) functional, and to introduce additional variables which can be interpreted as phases of the one-particle states of the independent particle reference system formed with the natural orbitals, thus obtaining so-called phase-including natural orbital (PINO) functionals. We also stress the importance of the correct choice of the complex conjugation in the two-electron integrals in the commonly used functionals (they should not be of exchange type). We demonstrate with the Löwdin-Shull energy expression for two-electron systems, which is an example of a PINO functional, that for two-electron systems exact responses (polarizabilities, excitation energies) are obtained, while writing this energy expression in the usual way as a 1RDM functional yields erroneous responses. [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]