Efficient evaluation of dielectric response functions and calculations of ground and excited state properties beyond local Density Functional approaches

A recently developed technique to diagonalize iteratively dielectric matrices [1], is used to carry out efficient, ab-initio calculations of dispersion interactions, and excited state properties of nanostructures. In particular, we present results for the binding energies of weakly bonded molecular crystals [2], obtained at the EXX/RPA level of theory, and for absorption spectra of semiconducting clusters, obtained by an iterative solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equations [3]. We show that the ability to obtain the eigenmodes of dielectric matrices from Density Functional perturbation theory, without computing single particle excited states, greatly improves the efficiency of both EXX/RPA and many body perturbation theory [3,4] calculations and opens the way to large scale computations. [1] H. Wilson, F. Gygi and G. Galli, Phys. Rev. B , 78, 113303, 2008; and H. Wilson, D. Lu, F. Gygi and G. Galli, Phys. Rev. B, 79, 245106, 2009. [2] D. Lu, Y. Li, D. Rocca and G. Galli, Phys. Rev. Lett, 102, 206411, 2009; and Y. Li, D. Lu, V. Nguyen and G. Galli, J. Phys. Chem. C (submitted) [3] D. Rocca, D. Lu and G. Galli, submitted. [4] D. Lu, F. Gygi and G. Galli, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 147601, 2008. Work was funded by DOE/Scidac DE-FC02-06ER25794 and DOE/BES DE-FG02-06ER46262.