English

The Importance of being consistent

Chemical Physics 2016-11-22 v1

Abstract

We review the role of self-consistency in density functional theory. We apply a recent analysis to both Kohn-Sham and orbital-free DFT, as well as to Partition-DFT, which generalizes all aspects of standard DFT. In each case, the analysis distinguishes between errors in approximate functionals versus errors in the self-consistent density. This yields insights into the origins of many errors in DFT calculations, especially those often attributed to self-interaction or delocalization error. In many classes of problems, errors can be substantially reduced by using `better' densities. We review the history of these approaches, many of their applications, and give simple pedagogical examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.06659,
  title  = {The Importance of being consistent},
  author = {Adam Wasserman and Jonathan Nafziger and Kaili Jiang and Min-Cheol Kim and Eunji Sim and Kieron Burke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.06659},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

submitted for publication to the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:58:48.724Z