Band gap studies of zigzag-edge graphene ribbons are presented. While earlier calculations at LDA level show that zigzag-edge graphene ribbons become half-metallic when cross-ribbon electric fields are applied, our calculations with hybrid density functional demonstrate that finite graphene ribbons behave as half-semiconductors. The spin-dependent band gap can be changed in a wide range, making possible many applications in spintronics.

In this work, we show that an implementation of Coulomb-attenuated density-functional theory leads to considerably better prospects than hitherto for modeling two-photon absorption cross sections for charge-transfer species. This functional, which corrects for the effect of poor asymptotic dependence of commonly used functionals, essentially brings down the widely different results for larger charge-transfer species between Hartree-Fock and density-functional theory (DFT)-B3LYP into a closer range. The Coulomb-attenuated functional, which retains the best aspects of the Hartree-Fock and DFT-B3LYP methods, proves to be very promising for further modeling design of multiphoton materials with technical applications.

We present a complete linear scaling method for hybrid Kohn-Sham density functional theory electronic structure calculations and demonstrate its performance. Particular attention is given to the linear scaling computation of the Kohn-Sham exchange-correlation matrix directly in sparse form within the generalized gradient approximation. The described method makes efficient use of sparse data structures at all times and scales linearly with respect to both computational time and memory usage. Benchmark calculations at the BHandHLYP/3-21G level of theory are presented for polypeptide helix molecules with up to 53 250 atoms. Threshold values for computational approximations were chosen on the basis of their impact on the occupied subspace so that the different parts of the calculations were carried out at balanced levels of accuracy. The largest calculation used 307 204 Gaussian basis functions on a single computer with 72 GB of memory. Benchmarks for three-dimensional water clusters are also included, as well as results using the 6-31G** basis set.

Density matrix purification, although being a powerful tool for linear scaling construction of the density matrix in electronic structure calculations, has been limited by uncontrolled error accumulation. In this article, a strategy for the removal of small matrix elements in density matrix purification is proposed with which the forward error can be rigorously controlled. The total forward error is separated into two parts, the error in eigenvalues and the error in the occupied invariant subspace. We use the concept of canonical angles to measure and control differences between exact and approximate occupied subspaces. We also analyze the conditioning of the density matrix construction problem and propose a method for calculation of interior eigenvalues to be used together with density matrix purification.