Computing photoionization spectra in Gaussian basis sets

Abstract

We present a method to compute the photoionization spectra of atoms and molecules in linear-response, time-dependent density functional theory. The electronic orbital variations corresponding to ionized electrons are expanded on a basis set of delocalized functions, obtained as the solution of the inhomogeneous Helmholtz equation, with gaussian basis set functions as the right-hand side. The resulting scheme is able to reproduce the photoionization spectra without any need for artificial regularization or localization. We demonstrate that this Green's function-based approach is able to produce accurate spectra for semilocal exchange-correlation functionals, even using relatively small standard gaussian basis sets.