English

Exact thermal density functional theory for a model system: Correlation components and accuracy of the zero-temperature exchange-correlation approximation

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2016-06-29 v2 Materials Science

Abstract

Thermal density functional theory calculations often use the Mermin-Kohn-Sham scheme, but employ ground-state approximations to the exchange-correlation (XC) free energy. In the simplest solvable nontrivial model, an asymmetric Hubbard dimer, we calculate the exact many-body energies and the exact Mermin-Kohn-Sham functionals for this system and extract the exact XC free energy. For moderate temperatures and weak correlation, we find this approximation to be excellent. We extract various exact free-energy correlation components and the exact adiabatic connection formula.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.03097,
  title  = {Exact thermal density functional theory for a model system: Correlation components and accuracy of the zero-temperature exchange-correlation approximation},
  author = {Justin C Smith and Aurora Pribram-Jones and Kieron Burke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.03097},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:53:35.800Z