Electrical Response of Molecular Chains from Density Functional Theory

The electrical response of molecular chains is dramatically overestimated by local and semilocal density functionals. We show that Kohn-Sham density-functional theory yields accurate linear and nonlinear polarizabilities when the exact exchange energy is employed together with the corresponding exact Kohn-Sham potential. We further show that approximations to the exact-exchange Kohn-Sham potential that are very accurate for the ground-state energy can nevertheless fail badly for the response because of potential barriers that have little effect on the ground-state energy but strongly affect the electron mobility.