Quasiparticle band structure of vanadium dioxide

Vanadium dioxide is insulating below 340 K in experiments, whereas the band structure calculated in the local density approximation (LDA) is gapless. We study the self-energy effects using the ab initio GW method. We found that the self-energy depends strongly on the energy, and proper treatment of the dynamical effect is essential for getting precise quasiparticle energies. Off-diagonal matrix elements in the Kohn–Sham basis are also important for disentangling bands. Inclusion of the two effects opens up a direct gap. Our results also suggest that one-shot GW on top of LDA is not enough, and the impact of self-consistency is significant.