Accelerating the convergence of the total energy evaluation in density functional theory calculations

A special feature of the Strutinsky shell correction method (SCM) D. Ullmo et al., Phys. Rev. B 63, 125339 (2001)] and the recently proposed orbital-corrected orbital-free density functional theory (OO-DFT) B. Zhou and Y. A. Wang, J. Chem. Phys. 124, 081107 (2006)] is that the second-order corrections are incorporated in the total energy evaluation. In the SCM, the series expansion of the total electronic energy is essentially the Harris functional with its second-order correction. Unfortunately, a serious technical problem for the SCM is the lack of the exact Kohn-Sham (KS) density rho KS(r) required for the evaluation of the second-order correction. To overcome this obstacle, we design a scheme that utilizes the optimal density from a high-quality density mixing scheme to approximate rho KS(r). Recently, we proposed two total energy density functionals, i.e., the Zhou-Wang-lambda (ZW lambda) and the Wang-Zhou-alpha (WZ alpha) functionals, for use in the OO-DFT method. If the two interpolation parameters, lambda and alpha, are chosen to allow the second-order errors of the ZW lambda and the WZ alpha functionals to vanish, these two functionals reduce to the Hohenberg-Kohn-Sham functional with its second-order correction. Again, the optimal density from a high-quality density mixing scheme is used to approximate rho KS(r) in the evaluation of lambda and alpha. This approach is tested in iterative KS-DFT calculations on systems with different chemical environments and can also be generalized for use in other iterative first-principles quantum chemistry methods.