Self-interaction free local exchange potentials applied to metallic systems.

We extend the formalism of local exchange methods to calculate and investigate the electronic structure of metals. It is well-known that the Hartree-Fock method when applied to metals shows unphysical behaviour, however the accurate treatment of exchange via DFT's exact exchange method and using our local Fock exchange method can be used to describe metallic band structures accurately.

A local Fock-exchange potential in Kohn-Sham equations.

We derive and employ a local potential to represent the Fock exchange operator in electronic single-particle equations. This local Fock-exchange (LFX) potential is very similar to the exact exchange (EXX) potential in density functional theory (DFT). The practical software implementation of the two potentials (LFX and EXX) yields robust and accurate results for a variety of systems (semiconductors, transition metal oxides) where Hartree-Fock and popular approximations of DFT typically fail. This includes examples traditionally considered qualitatively inaccessible to calculations that omit correlation.

Distinct magnetic phase transition at the surface of an antiferromagnet.

In the majority of magnetic systems the surface is required to order at the same temperature as the bulk. In the present Letter, we report a distinct and unexpected surface magnetic phase transition at a lower temperature than the Néel temperature. Employing grazing incidence x-ray resonant magnetic scattering, we have observed the near-surface behavior of uranium dioxide. UO2 is a noncollinear, triple-q, antiferromagnet with the U ions on a face-centered cubic lattice. Theoretical investigations establish that at the surface the energy increase-due to the lost bonds-is reduced when the spins near the surface rotate, gradually losing their component normal to the surface. At the surface the lowest-energy spin configuration has a double-q (planar) structure. With increasing temperature, thermal fluctuations saturate the in-plane crystal field anisotropy at the surface, leading to soft excitations that have ferromagnetic XY character and are decoupled from the bulk. The structure factor of a finite two-dimensional XY model fits the experimental data well for several orders of magnitude of the scattered intensity. Our results support a distinct magnetic transition at the surface in the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class.

Size consistency of explicit functionals of the natural orbitals in reduced density matrix functional theory.

We report a size-inconsistency problem for several functionals within reduced density matrix functional theory. Being explicit functionals of the natural orbitals and occupation numbers, instead of the one-body reduced density matrix, many of the approximate functionals are not invariant under unitary transformations in the subspace of degenerate occupation numbers. One such transformation mixes the degenerate natural orbitals of identical independent subsystems, delocalizing them. Noninvariance under this transformation results in size inconsistency for some of the approximations while others avoid this pathology by favoring orbital localization.

Spurious interactions, and their correction, in the ensemble-Kohn-Sham scheme for excited States.

We observe that the direct Coulomb (Hartree) term appearing in the ensemble-density-functional theory for excited states contains an unphysical ("ghost") interaction which has to be corrected by the ensemble exchange and correlation functional. We propose a simple additive correction to the conventional ensemble exchange energy in the form of an orbital functional. By treating this corrected exchange energy functional self-consistently within the optimized effective potential method one finds a significant improvement of atomic excitation energies.