Density Functional Theory: A great physics success story

COFFEE_KLATCH  · Invited

Abstract

Last year, more than 30,000 scientific papers were published that used Kohn-Sham DFT. The material with the currently highest ever measured superconducting transition temperate (203K) was predicted from such calculations. I will discuss this wonderfully interdisciplinary field in general, the importance of non-empirical approaches to approximating the exchange-correlation functional in particular, and what the future of the field might bring. As a former student of Walter Kohn, I will include my sense of his approach to theoretical physics.

–

Authors

  • Kieron Burke

    • Departments of Physics and of Chemistry, UC Irvine
    • Department of Chemistry and of Physics, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
    • University of California Irvine
    • University of California, Irvine
    • Department of Chemistry and of Physics, University of California, Irvine