Density functional theory maps an interacting Hamiltonian onto the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian, an explicitly free model with identical local fermion densities. Using the interaction distance, the minimum distance between the ground state of the interacting system and a generic free fermion state, we quantify the applicability and limitations of the exact Kohn-Sham model in capturing the various properties of the interacting system. As a byproduct, this distance determines the optimal free state that reproduces the entanglement properties of the interacting system as faithfully as possible. The parent Hamiltonian of the optimal free state identifies a system that can determine the expectation value of any observable with controlled accuracy. This optimal entanglement model opens up the possibility of extending the systematic applicability of auxiliary free models into the non-perturbative, strongly-correlated regimes.
This article is concerned with the mathematical analysis of the Kohn-Sham and extended Kohn-Sham models, in the local density approximation (LDA) and generalized gradient approximation (GGA) frameworks. After recalling the mathematical derivation of the Kohn-Sham and extended Kohn-Sham LDA and GGA models from the Schrödinger equation, we prove that the extended Kohn-Sham LDA model has a solution for neutral and positively charged systems. We then prove a similar result for the spin-unpolarized Kohn-Sham GGA model for two-electron systems, by means of a concentration-compactness argument.
We prove a generalization of the van Leeuwen theorem towards quantum electrodynamics, providing the formal foundations of a time-dependent Kohn-Sham construction for coupled quantized matter and electromagnetic fields. Thereby we circumvent the symmetry-causality problems associated with the action-functional approach to Kohn-Sham systems. We show that the effective external four-potential and four-current of the Kohn-Sham system are uniquely defined and that the effective four-current takes a very simple form. Further we rederive the Runge-Gross theorem for quantum electrodynamics.
In this work, the existence, uniqueness and regularity of solutions to the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations are investigated. The Kohn-Sham equations are a system of nonlinear coupled Schrödinger equations that describe multi-particle quantum systems in the framework of the time dependent density functional theory. In view of applications with control problems, the presence of a control function and of an inhomogeneity are also taken into account.
The reconstruction of the exchange-correlation potential from accurate ab initio electron densities can provide insights into the limitations of the currently available approximate functionals and provide guidance for devising improved approximations for density-functional theory (DFT). For open-shell systems, the spin density is introduced as an additional fundamental variable in Spin-DFT. Here, we consider the reconstruction of the corresponding unrestricted Kohn-Sham potentials from accurate ab initio spin densities. In particular, we investigate whether it is possible to reconstruct the sp…
The exact Kohn-Sham iteration of generalized density-functional theory in finite dimensions witha Moreau-Yosida regularized universal Lieb functional and an adaptive damping step is shown toconverge to the correct ground-state density.
We generalize the recently developped "internal" Density Functional Theory (DFT) and Kohn-Sham scheme to multicomponent systems. We obtain a general formalism, applicable for the description of multicomponent self-bound systems (as molecules where the nuclei are treated explicitely, atomic nuclei and mix of 3He and 4He droplets), where the fundamental translational symmetry has been treated correctly. The main difference with traditional DFT is the explicit inclusion of center-of-mass correlations in the functional. A large part of the paper is dedicated to the application to molecules, which …
We study the asymptotic expansion of the neutral-atom energy as the atomic number Z goes to infinity, presenting a new method to extract the coefficients from oscillating numerical data. We find that recovery of the correct expansion is an exact condition on the Kohn-Sham kinetic energy that is important for the accuracy of approximate kinetic energy functionals for atoms, molecules and solids, when evaluated on a Kohn-Sham density. For example, this determines the small gradient limit of any generalized gradient approximation, and conflicts somewhat with the standard gradient expansion. Tests…
Many application models in quantum physics and chemistry require to control multi-electron systems to achieve a desired target configuration. This challenging task appears possible in the framework of time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) that allows to describe these systems while avoiding the high dimensionality resulting from the multi-particle Schrödinger equation. For this purpose, the theory and numerical solution of optimal control problems governed by a Kohn-Sham TDDFT model are investigated, considering different objectives and a bilinear control mechanism. Existence of opt…
The rectangular collocation approach makes it possible to solve the Schrödinger equation with basis functions that do not have amplitude in all regions in which wavefunctions have significant amplitude. Collocation points can be restricted to a small region of space. As no integrals are computed, there are no problems due to discontinuities in the potential, and there is no need to use integrable basis functions. In this paper, we show, for the Kohn-Sham equation, that machine learning can be used to drastically reduce the size of the collocation point set. This is demonstrated by solving the …
A detailed account of the Kohn-Sham algorithm from quantum chemistry, formulated rigorously in the very general setting of convex analysis on Banach spaces, is given here. Starting from a Levy-Lieb-type functional, its convex and lower semi-continuous extension is regularized to obtain differentiability. This extra layer allows to rigorously introduce, in contrast to the common unregularized approach, a well-defined Kohn-Sham iteration scheme. Convergence in a weak sense is then proven. This generalized formulation is applicable to a wide range of different density-functional theories and poss…
Deriving accurate energy density functional is one of the central problems in condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and quantum chemistry. We propose a novel method to deduce the energy density functional by combining the idea of the functional renormalization group and the Kohn-Sham scheme in density functional theory. The key idea is to solve the renormalization group flow for the effective action decomposed into the mean-field part and the correlation part. Also, we propose a simple practical method to quantify the uncertainty associated with the truncation of the correlation part. By …
In the well-known Kohn-Sham theory in Density Functional Theory, a fictitious non-interacting system is introduced that has the same particle density as a system of $N$ electrons subjected to mutual Coulomb repulsion and an external electric field. For a long time, the treatment of the kinetic energy was not correct and the theory was not well-defined for $N$-representable particle densities. In the work of [Hadjisavvas and Theophilou, Phys. Rev. A, 1984, 30, 2183], a rigorous Kohn-Sham theory for $N$-representable particle densities was developed using the Levy-Lieb functional. Since a Levy-L…
Given the time-evolution of an electron charge density, the local potential in Kohn-Sham time-dependent density functional theory (KS-TDDFT) can be modeled as a sum of instantaneous and dynamic contributions by assuming a certain form of the time-dependent Kohn-Sham (TD-KS) orbitals. The instantaneous part is obtained numerically using methods from ground-state density functional theory (DFT) and the dynamic part is expressed in terms of a velocity potential that depends on the electron current density. The suggested form of the TD-KS orbitals satisfies several known constraints (orthonormalit…
In this paper, we study numerical discretizations to solve density functional models in the "strictly correlated electrons" (SCE) framework. Unlike previous studies our work is not restricted to radially symmetric densities. In the SCE framework, the exchange-correlation functional encodes the effects of the strong correlation regime by minimizing the pairwise Coulomb repulsion, resulting in an optimal transport problem. We give a mathematical derivation of the self-consistent Kohn-Sham-SCE equations, construct an efficient numerical discretization for this type of problem for N = 2 electrons,…
In numerical computations of response properties of electronic systems, the standard model is Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KS-DFT). Here we investigate the mathematical status of the simplest class of excitations in KS-DFT, HOMO-LUMO excitations. We show using concentration-compactness arguments that such excitations, i.e. excited states of the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian, exist for $Z>N$, where $Z$ is the total nuclear charge and $N$ is the number of electrons. The result applies under realistic assumptions on the exchange-correlation functional, which we verify explicitly for the widely us…
The Floquet theorem allows to reformulate periodic time-dependent problems such as the interaction of a many-body system with a laser field in terms of time-independent, field-dressed states, also known as Floquet states. If this was possible for density functional theory as well, one could reduce in such cases time-dependent density functional theory to a time-independent Floquet density functional theory. We analyze under which conditions the Floquet theorem is applicable in a density-functional framework. By employing numerical {\em ab initio} solutions of the interacting time-dependent Sch…
This work presents a theory to unify the two independent theoretical frameworks of Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory (DFT) and reduced density matrix functional theory (RDMFT). The generalization of the KS orbitals to hypercomplex number systems leads to the hypercomplex KS (HCKS) theory, which extends the search space for the density in KS-DFT to a space that is equivalent to natural spin orbitals with fractional occupations in RDMFT. Thereby, HCKS is able to capture the multi-reference nature of strong correlation by dynamically varying fractional occupations. Moreover, the potential …
The density-functional approach to quantum electrodynamics is extending traditional density-functional theory and opens the possibility to describe electron-photon interactions in terms of effective Kohn-Sham potentials. In this work, we numerically construct the exact electron-photon Kohn-Sham potentials for a prototype system which consists of a trapped electron coupled to a quantized electromagnetic mode in an optical high-Q cavity. While the effective current that acts on the photons is known explicitly, the exact effective potential that describes the forces exerted by the photons on the …
We present the theoretical foundations and the implementation details of a density-functional approach for coupled photons, electrons, and effective nuclei in non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics. Starting point of the formalism is a generalization of the Pauli-Fierz field theory for which we establish a one-to-one correspondence between external fields and internal variables. Based on this correspondence, we introduce a Kohn-Sham construction which provides a computationally feasible approach for ab-initio light-matter interactions. In the mean-field limit for the effective nuclei the for…
In the framework of Kohn-Sham density-functional theory, systems with ground-state densities that are not pure-state v-representable in the non-interacting reference system (PSVR) occur frequently. In the present contribution, a new algorithm, which allows the solution of such systems, is proposed. It is shown that the use of densities which do not correspond to a ground state of their non-interacting reference system is forbidden. As a consequence, the proposed algorithm considers only non-interacting ensemble v-representable densities. The Fe atom, a well-known non-PSVR system, is used as an…
We analyze the inverse problem of Density Functional Theory using a regularized variational method. First, we show that given $k$ and a target density $ρ$, there exist potentials having $k^{\text{th}}$ bound mixed states which densities are arbitrarily close to $ρ$. The state can be chosen pure in dimension $d=1$ and without interactions, and we provide numerical and theoretical evidence consistently leading us to conjecture that the same pure representability result holds for $d=2$, but that the set of pure-state $v$-representable densities is not dense for $d=3$. Finally, we present an inver…
