Abstract:We compare three different methods for direct energy minimization in electronic structure calculations where the gradient of the energy functional with respect to the molecular orbitals is available. These methods make use of the preconditioned gradient to increase robustness. An orbital transformation is used to ensure that the orthogonality constraint on the orbitals remains satisfied when using standard minimization methods. In addition, we propose an adaptive scheme for estimating the curvature of the energy functional to increase the performance of a line search free quasi-Newton method. We show that the performance of all methods is similar when robustness of the methods is ensured. We compare three different methods for direct energy minimization in electronic structure calculations where the gradient of the energy functional with respect to the molecular orbitals is available. These methods make use of the preconditioned gradient to increase robustness. An orbital transformation is used to ensure that the orthogonality constraint on the orbitals remains satisfied when using standard minimization methods. In addition, we propose an adaptive scheme for estimating the curvature of the energy functional to increase the performance of a line search free quasi-Newton method. We show that the performance of all methods is similar when robustness of the methods is ensured.

We show that the type 2 Broyden secant method is a robust general purpose mixer for self consistent field problems in density functional theory. The Broyden method gives reliable convergence for a large class of problems and parameter choices. We directly mix the approximation of the electronic density to provide a basis independent mixing scheme. In particular, we show that a single set of parameters can be chosen that give good results for a large range of problems. We also introduce a spin transformation to simplify treatment of spin polarized problems. The spin transformation allows us to treat these systems with the same formalism as regular fixed point iterations.

We consider a direct optimization approach for ensemble density functional theory electronic structure calculations. The update operator for the electronic orbitals takes the structure of the Stiefel manifold into account and we present an optimization scheme for the occupation numbers that ensures that the constraints remain satisfied. We also compare sequential and simultaneous quasi-Newton and nonlinear conjugate gradient optimization procedures, and demonstrate that simultaneous optimization of the electronic orbitals and occupation numbers improve performance compared to the sequential approach.

No abstract