English

A fast summation method for the DFT-D3 dispersion correction

Computational Physics 2026-07-16 v1

Abstract

The DFT-D3 dispersion correction is routinely added to machine learning force fields (MLFFs) trained on dispersion-deficient functionals such as PBE. Its environment-dependent pair coefficients, however, break the atom-centered separability that fast summation methods require, forcing practitioners either to truncate D3 or to accept a substantial slowdown. We introduce FourierD3, a method that uses a functional low-rank decomposition to restore this separability and enable particle-mesh evaluation in O(NlogN)O(N\log N) time without a real-space cutoff on the dispersion sum.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.15103,
  title  = {A fast summation method for the DFT-D3 dispersion correction},
  author = {Victoria Valeeva and Cheuk Hin Ho and Mario Geiger and Franco Pellegrini and Gábor Csányi and Emine Kucukbenli and Christoph Ortner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.15103},
  year   = {2026}
}