English

A highly accurate procedure for computing globally optimal Wannier functions in one-dimensional crystalline insulators

Mathematical Physics 2025-10-21 v4 Numerical Analysis math.MP Numerical Analysis Computational Physics

Abstract

A standard task in solid state physics and quantum chemistry is the computation of localized molecular orbitals known as Wannier functions. In this manuscript, we propose a new procedure for computing Wannier functions in one-dimensional crystalline materials. Our approach proceeds by first performing parallel transport of the Bloch functions using numerical integration. Then a simple analytically computable correction is introduced to yield the optimally localized Wannier function. The resulting scheme is rapidly convergent and is proven to yield real-valued Wannier functions that achieve global optimality. The analysis in this manuscript can also be viewed as a proof of the existence of exponentially localized Wannier functions in one dimension. We illustrate the performance of the scheme by a number of numerical experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.04369,
  title  = {A highly accurate procedure for computing globally optimal Wannier functions in one-dimensional crystalline insulators},
  author = {Abinand Gopal and Hanwen Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04369},
  year   = {2025}
}