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The adsorption of C60 on Si(111) has been studied by means of first-principles density functional calculations. A 2x2 adatom surface reconstruction was used to simulate the terraces of the 7x7 reconstruction. The structure of several possible adsorption configurations was optimized using the ab initio atomic forces, finding good candidates for two different adsorption states observed experimentally. While the C60 molecule remains closely spherical, the silicon substrate appears quite soft, especially the adatoms, which move substantially to form extra C-Si bonds, at the expense of breaking Si-Si bonds. The structural relaxation has a much larger effect on the adsorption energies, which strongly depend on the adsorption configuration, than on the charge transfer., Comment: 4 pages with 3 postscript figures, to appear in Surf. Science. (proceedings of the European Conference on Surface Science ECOSS-19, Sept 2000)

Quantum Monte Carlo methods are used to study a quantum phase transition in a 1D Hubbard model with a staggered ionic potential (D). Using recently formulated methods, the electronic polarization and localization are determined directly from the correlated ground state wavefunction and compared to results of previous work using exact diagonalization and Hartree-Fock. We find that the model undergoes a thermodynamic transition from a band insulator (BI) to a broken-symmetry bond ordered (BO) phase as the ratio of U/D is increased. Since it is known that at D = 0 the usual Hubbard model is a Mott insulator (MI) with no long-range order, we have searched for a second transition to this state by (i) increasing U at fixed ionic potential (D) and (ii) decreasing D at fixed U. We find no transition from the BO to MI state, and we propose that the MI state in 1D is unstable to bond ordering under the addition of any finite ionic potential. In real 1D systems the symmetric MI phase is never stable and the transition is from a symmetric BI phase to a dimerized BO phase, with a metallic point at the transition.

We have constructed maximally-localized Wannier functions for prototype structures of solid molecular hydrogen under pressure, starting from LDA and tight-binding Bloch wave functions. Each occupied Wannier function can be associated with two paired protons, defining a ``Wannier molecule''. The sum of the dipole moments of these ``molecules'' always gives the correct macroscopic polarization, even under strong compression, when the overlap between nearby Wannier functions becomes significant. We find that at megabar pressures the contributions to the dipoles arising from the overlapping tails of the Wannier functions is very large. The strong vibron infrared absorption experimentally observed in phase III, above ~ 150 GPa, is analyzed in terms of the vibron-induced fluctuations of the Wannier dipoles. We decompose these fluctuations into ``static'' and ``dynamical'' contributions, and find that at such high densities the latter term, which increases much more steeply with pressure, is dominant., Comment: 17 pages, two-column style with 14 postscript figures embedded. Uses REVTEX and epsf macros

We have calculated the exchange, correlation, and total electronic energy of a realistic InAs self-assembled quantum dot embedded in a GaAs matrix as a function of the number of electrons in the dot. The many-body interactions have been treated using the local spin density approximation (LSDA) to density functional theory (DFT) and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC), so that we may quantify the error introduced by LSDA. The comparison shows that the LSDA errors are about 1-2 meV per electron for the system considered. These errors are small enough to justify the use of LSDA calculations to test models of self-assembled dots against current experimental measurements., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Physica E

We study metallization of molecular hydrogen under pressure using exact exchange (EXX) Kohn-Sham density-functional theory in order to avoid well-known underestimates of band gaps associated with standard local-density or generalized-gradient approximations. Compared with the standard methods, the EXX approach leads to considerably (1 - 2 eV) higher gaps and significant changes in the relative energies of different structures. Metallization is predicted to occur at a density of >= 0.6 mol/cm^3 (corresponding to a pressure of >= 400 GPa), consistent with all previous measurements., Comment: 11 pages, 4 postscript figures

We study the Mott transition in Hubbard models with a degenerate band on different 3-dimensional lattices. While for a non-degenerate band only the half-filled system may exhibit a Mott transition, with degeneracy there can be a transition for any integer filling. We analyze the filling dependence of the Mott transition and find that $U_c$ (the Hubbard interaction $U$ at which the transition takes place) decreases away from half-filling. In addition we can change the lattice structure of the model. This allows us to study the influence of frustration on the Mott transition. We find that frustration increases $U_c$, compared to bipartite systems. The results were obtained from fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculations using trial functions which allow us to systematically vary the magnetic character of the system. To gain a qualitative understanding of the results, we have developed simple hopping arguments that help to rationalize the doping dependence and the influence of frustration on the Mott transition. Choosing the model parameters to describe the doped Fullerides, we can make contact with experiment and understand why some of the Fullerides are metals, while others, which according to density functional theory should also be metallic, actually are insulators., Comment: 4 pages LaTeX with 4 eps figures; submitted to Computer Physics Communications, Proceedings of the CPP'99/Centennial Meeting, Atlanta, GA; additional material available at http://www.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de/docs/ANDERSEN/fullerene/

We describe the object-oriented implementation of a higher-order finite-difference density-functional code in Fortran 90. Object-oriented models of grid and related objects are constructed and employed for the implementation of an efficient one-way multigrid method we have recently proposed for the density-functional electronic-structure calculations. Detailed analysis of performance and strategy of the one-way multigrid scheme will be presented., Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Comput. Phys. Comm

We investigate the behavior of three-dimensional (3D) exchange-correlation energy functional approximations of density functional theory in anisotropic systems with two-dimensional (2D) character. Using two simple models, quasi-2D electron gas and two-electron quantum dot, we show a {\it fundamental limitation} of the local density approximation (LDA), and its semi-local extensions, generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and meta-GGA (MGGA), the most widely used forms of which are worse than the LDA in the strong 2D limit. The origin of these shortcomings is in the inability of the local (LDA) and semi-local (GGA/MGGA) approximations to describe systems with 2D character in which the nature of the exchange-correlation hole is very nonlocal. Nonlocal functionals provide an alternative approach, and explicitly the average density approximation (ADA) is shown to be remarkably accurate for the quasi-2D electron gas system. Our study is not only relevant for understanding of the functionals but also practical applications to semiconductor quantum structures and materials such as graphite and metal surfaces. We also comment on the implication of our findings to the practical device simulations based on the (semi-)local density functional method., Comment: 21 pages including 9 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. B

We develop the theory and practical expressions for the full quantum-mechanical distribution of the intrinsic macroscopic polarization of an insulator in terms of the ground state wavefunction. The central quantity is a cumulant generating function which yields, upon successive differentiation, all the cumulants and moments of the probability distribution of the center of mass X/N of the electrons, defined appropriately to remain valid for extended systems obeying twisted boundary conditions. The first moment is the average polarization, where we recover the well-known Berry phase expression. The second cumulant gives the mean-square fluctuation of the polarization, which defines an electronic localization length xi_i along each direction i. It follows from the fluctuation-dissipation theorem that in the thermodynamic limit xi_i diverges for metals and is a finite, measurable quantity for insulators. It is possible to define for insulators maximally-localized ``many-body Wannier functions'', which for large N become localized in disconnected regions of the high-dimensional configuration space, establishing a direct connection with Kohn's theory of the insulating state. Interestingly, the expression for xi_i^2, which involves the second derivative of the wavefunction with respect to the boundary conditions, is directly analogous to Kohn's formula for the ``Drude weight'' as the second derivative of the energy., Comment: 25 pages and 3 postscript figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. B. Manuscript was made more concise and some new results were added (Section V-B)

We report density-functional studies of several small molecules ($H_{2}, N_{2}, CO, H_{2}O$, and $CH_{4}$) within the Krieger-Li-Iafrate (KLI) approximation to the exact Kohn-Sham local exchange potential, using a three-dimensional real-space finite-difference pseudopotential method. It is found that exchange-only KLI leads to markedly improved eigenvalue spectra compared to those obtained within the standard local-density approximation (LDA), the generalized gradient approximation (GGA), and the Hartree-Fock (HF) method. For structural properties, exchange-only KLI results are close to the corresponding HF values. We find that the addition of LDA or GGA correlation energy functionals to the KLI exact exchange energy functional does not lead to systematic improvements., Comment: 16 pages including 1 fugure, to be published in Phys. Rev. A Nov. 1 '99

Describing the doped Fullerenes using a generalized Hubbard model, we study the Mott transition for different integer fillings of the t_1u band. We use the opening of the energy-gap E_g as a criterion for the transition. E_g is calculated as a function of the on-site Coulomb interaction U using fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo. We find that for systems with doping away from half-filling the Mott transitions occurs at smaller U than for the half-filled system. We give a simple model for the doping dependence of the Mott transition., Comment: 7 pages RevTeX with 10 eps figures, additional material available at http://www.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de/docs/ANDERSEN/fullerene/

We study the static screening in a Hubbard-like model using fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo. We find that the random phase approximation is surprisingly accurate even for metallic systems close to the Mott transition. As a specific application we discuss the implications of the efficient screening for the superconductivity in the doped Fullerenes. In the Monte Carlo calculations we use trial functions with two Gutzwiller-type parameters. To deal with such trial functions, we introduce a method for efficiently optimizing the Gutzwiller parameters, both in variational and in fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo., Comment: 4 pages LaTeX with 4 eps figures; Computer Simulations Studies in Condensed Matter Physics XII, Eds.: D.P. Landau, S.P. Lewis, and H.B. Schuettler, Springer 1999; additional material available at http://www.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de/docs/ANDERSEN/fullerene/

Gutzwiller functions are popular variational wavefunctions for correlated electrons in Hubbard models. Following the variational principle, we are interested in the Gutzwiller parameters that minimize e.g. the expectation value of the energy. Rewriting the expectation value as a rational function in the Gutzwiller parameters, we find a very efficient way for performing that minimization. The method can be used to optimize general Gutzwiller-type wavefunctions both, in variational and in fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo., Comment: 9 pages RevTeX with 10 eps figures

We study the static screening in a Hubbard-like model using quantum Monte Carlo. We find that the random phase approximation is surprisingly accurate almost up to the Mott transition. We argue that in alkali-doped Fullerenes the Coulomb pseudopotential $\mu^\ast$ is not very much reduced by retardation effects. Therefore efficient screening is important in reducing $\mu^{\ast}$ sufficiently to allow for an electron-phonon driven superconductivity. In this way the Fullerides differ from the conventional picture, where retardation effects play a major role in reducing the electron-electron repulsion., Comment: 4 pages RevTeX with 2 eps figures, additional material available at http://www.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de/docs/ANDERSEN/fullerene/

Under a pressure of ~150 GPa solid molecular hydrogen undergoes a phase transition accompanied by a dramatic rise in infra-red absorption in the vibron frequency range. We use the Berry's phase approach to calculate the electric polarization in several candidate structures finding large, anisotropic dynamic charges and strongly IR-active vibron modes. The polarization is shown to be greatly affected by the overlap between the molecules in the crystal, so that the commonly used Clausius-Mossotti description in terms of polarizable, non-overlapping molecular charge densities is inadequate already at low pressures and even more so for the compressed solid., Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett