E. Weinan

Lin Lin, Jianfeng Lu, Lexing Ying et al.

Kohn-Sham density functional theory is one of the most widely used electronic structure theories. In the pseudopotential framework, uniform discretization of the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian generally results in a large number of basis functions per atom in order to resolve the rapid oscillations of the Kohn-Sham orbitals around the nuclei. Previous attempts to reduce the number of basis functions per atom include the usage of atomic orbitals and similar objects, but the atomic orbitals generally require fine tuning in order to reach high accuracy. We present a novel discretization scheme that adaptively and systematically builds the rapid oscillations of the Kohn-Sham orbitals around the nuclei as well as environmental effects into the basis functions. The resulting basis functions are localized in the real space, and are discontinuous in the global domain. The continuous Kohn-Sham orbitals and the electron density are evaluated from the discontinuous basis functions using the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) framework. Our method is implemented in parallel and the current implementation is able to handle systems with at least thousands of atoms. Numerical examples indicate that our method can reach very high accuracy (less than 1meV) with a very small number ($4\sim 40$) of basis functions per atom.

Lin Lin, Jianfeng Lu, Lexing Ying et al.

We develop a technique for generating a set of optimized local basis functions to solve models in the Kohn-Sham density functional theory for both insulating and metallic systems. The optimized local basis functions are obtained by solving a minimization problem in an admissible set determined by a large number of primitive basis functions. Using the optimized local basis set, the electron energy and the atomic force can be calculated accurately with a small number of basis functions. The Pulay force is systematically controlled and is not required to be calculated, which makes the optimized local basis set an ideal tool for ab initio molecular dynamics and structure optimization. We also propose a preconditioned Newton-GMRES method to obtain the optimized local basis functions in practice. The optimized local basis set is able to achieve high accuracy with a small number of basis functions per atom when applied to a one dimensional model problem.