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Title: Adaptive local basis set for Kohn–Sham density functional theory in a discontinuous Galerkin framework II: Force, vibration, and molecular dynamics calculations

Journal Article · · Journal of Computational Physics
 [1];  [2];  [1];  [1]
  1. Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
  2. Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)

Recently, we have proposed the adaptive local basis set for electronic structure calculations based on Kohn–Sham density functional theory in a pseudopotential framework. The adaptive local basis set is efficient and systematically improvable for total energy calculations. In this paper, we present the calculation of atomic forces, which can be used for a range of applications such as geometry optimization and molecular dynamics simulation. We demonstrate that, under mild assumptions, the computation of atomic forces can scale nearly linearly with the number of atoms in the system using the adaptive local basis set. We quantify the accuracy of the Hellmann–Feynman forces for a range of physical systems, benchmarked against converged planewave calculations, and find that the adaptive local basis set is efficient for both force and energy calculations, requiring at most a few tens of basis functions per atom to attain accuracies required in practice. Since the adaptive local basis set has implicit dependence on atomic positions, Pulay forces are in general nonzero. However, we find that the Pulay force is numerically small and systematically decreasing with increasing basis completeness, so that the Hellmann–Feynman force is sufficient for basis sizes of a few tens of basis functions per atom. We verify the accuracy of the computed forces in static calculations of quasi-1D and 3D disordered Si systems, vibration calculation of a quasi-1D Si system, and molecular dynamics calculations of H{sub 2} and liquid Al–Si alloy systems, where we show systematic convergence to benchmark planewave results and results from the literature.

OSTI ID:
22622279
Journal Information:
Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 335; Other Information: Copyright (c) 2016 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9991
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Cited By (2)

Ab initio simulations of liquid electrolytes for energy conversion and storage journal October 2018
An Asymptotics-Based Adaptive Finite Element Method for Kohn–Sham Equation journal October 2018