On the self-consistent implementation of general occupied-orbital dependent exchange-correlation functionals with application to the B05 functional

J Chem Phys. 2009 Aug 28;131(8):084103. doi: 10.1063/1.3205003.

Abstract

Occupied-orbital dependent (OOD) exchange-correlation functionals hold a particularly prominent place in current developments of density functional theory. Their self-consistent implementation is complicated by the fact that their orbital-dependent parts are not explicit but only implicit functionals of electron density, and the exchange-correlation potential may not be obtained straightforwardly by taking the functional derivative with respect to the density. A two-step procedure is required, in which initially the functional derivatives with respect to the orbitals (FDOs) are obtained, which may then be transformed into local and multiplicative potentials by techniques of the optimized-effective potential. In view of the rather large variety of OOD functionals under current study, we report here general, systematic, and transparent expressions of the FDOs of a generalized OOD functional and additionally a matrix-element version in a basis set of atomic orbitals. Explicit FDOs are for the first time derived and numerically tested for one of the currently most complex examples of an OOD functional, Becke's real-space model of nondynamical correlation (B05 functional) [J. Chem. Phys. 122, 064101 (2005)].