English

PyCDFT: A Python package for constrained density functional theory

Materials Science 2020-07-07 v1

Abstract

We present PyCDFT, a Python package to compute diabatic states using constrained density functional theory (CDFT). PyCDFT provides an object-oriented, customizable implementation of CDFT, and allows for both single-point self-consistent-field calculations and geometry optimizations. PyCDFT is designed to interface with existing density functional theory (DFT) codes to perform CDFT calculations where constraint potentials are added to the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian. Here we demonstrate the use of PyCDFT by performing calculations with a massively parallel first-principles molecular dynamics code, Qbox, and we benchmark its accuracy by computing the electronic coupling between diabatic states for a set of organic molecules. We show that PyCDFT yields results in agreement with existing implementations and is a robust and flexible package for performing CDFT calculations. The program is available at https://github.com/hema-ted/pycdft/.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.08021,
  title  = {PyCDFT: A Python package for constrained density functional theory},
  author = {He Ma and Wennie Wang and Siyoung Kim and Man-Hin Cheng and Marco Govoni and Giulia Galli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.08021},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

main text: 27 pages, 6 figures supplementary: 7 pages, 2 figures