核心概念
The authors have developed a new local hybrid functional, CHYF, that is designed from first principles to be general and transferable across a wide range of applications in quantum physics, chemistry, and materials science. The functional shows excellent performance for a variety of properties, including thermochemistry, excitation energies, magnetic properties, and NMR parameters, while being numerically robust and requiring only small computational grids.
摘要
The authors present a new local hybrid functional, CHYF, that is constructed from first principles to be general and transferable across different applications in quantum mechanics. The key aspects of the work are:
-
Exchange Functional:
- The exchange enhancement factor is derived from the slowly-varying limit of the SCAN exchange functional and the iso-orbital limit using the density matrix expansion.
- The parameters are optimized to satisfy theoretical constraints rather than fitting to molecular datasets.
-
Local Mixing Function (LMF):
- The LMF is constructed using the correlation length, with enhancements in the slowly-varying and iso-orbital regions to ensure the correct high-density limit.
- The LMF allows a fully position-dependent amount of exact exchange to be incorporated.
-
Correlation Functional:
- The correlation functional is derived from first principles, using a coupling-strength integration approach.
- It captures the correct behavior in the high-density iso-orbital limit and the low-density strongly interacting limit.
The performance of CHYF is assessed for a wide range of properties:
- Thermochemistry: CHYF outperforms other functionals designed with theoretical constraints, and is comparable to highly parameterized local and range-separated hybrid functionals.
- Excitation Energies: CHYF significantly improves upon the accuracy of other density functionals, approaching the performance of high-level wavefunction methods.
- Magnetic Properties: CHYF shows excellent performance for NMR shifts, coupling constants, and EPR hyperfine couplings.
The functional is numerically robust, requiring only small computational grids for converged results, and can be easily generalized to other fermions beyond electrons, as demonstrated for electron-proton correlation energies.
统计
"Thermochemistry is a major strength of CHYF, with mean absolute deviations of 3.3 kcal/mol for atomization energies and 3.3 kcal/mol for barrier heights."
"CHYF cuts the root-mean-square deviation for excitation energies by 20% compared to other density functionals, approaching the accuracy of high-level wavefunction methods."
"For NMR shifts of organic compounds, CHYF achieves a mean absolute error of only 0.06 ppm, a significant improvement over the previous TMHF functional."
引用
"The new density functional shows excellent performance throughout all tests and is numerically robust only requiring small grids for converged results."
"Density functionals generated in this way are general purpose tools for quantum mechanical studies."