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arXiv:1511.02194 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Exact conditions on the temperature dependence of density functionals

Kieron Burke, Justin C. Smith, Paul Grabowski, Aurora Pribram−Jones

Published May 17, 2016• 50 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Universal exact conditions guided the construction of most ground-state density functional approximations in use today. We derive the relation between the entropy and Mermin free energy density functionals for thermal density functional theory. Both the entropy and sum of kinetic and electron-electron repulsion functionals are shown to be monotonically increasing with temperature, while the Mermin functional is concave downwards. Analogous relations are found for both exchange and correlation. The importance of these conditions is illustrated in two extremes: the Hubbard dimer and the uniform gas.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.93.195132

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Universal exact conditions guided the construction of most ground-state density functional approximations in use today. We derive the relation between the entropy and Mermin free energy density functionals for thermal density functional theory. Both the entropy and sum of kinetic and electron-electron repulsion functionals are shown to be monotonically increasing with temperature, while the Mermin functional is concave downwards. Analogous relations are found for both exchange and correlation. The importance of these conditions is illustrated in two extremes: the Hubbard dimer and the uniform gas.
Thermal density functional theory calculations often use the Mermin-Kohn-Sham scheme, but employ ground-state approximations to the exchange-correlation (XC) free energy. In the simplest solvable nontrivial model, an asymmetric Hubbard dimer, we calculate the exact many-body energies and the exact Mermin-Kohn-Sham functionals for this system and extract the exact XC free energy. For moderate temperatures and weak correlation, we find this approximation to be excellent. We extract various exact free-energy correlation components and the exact adiabatic connection formula.
The adiabatic connection formula of ground-state density functional theory relates the correlation energy to a coupling-constant integral over a purely potential contribution, and is widely used to understand and improve approximations. The corresponding formula for thermal density functional theory is cast as an integral over temperatures instead, ranging upward from the system's physical temperature. We also show how to relate different correlation components to each other, either in terms of temperature or coupling-constant integrations. We illustrate our results on the uniform electron gas.
Present density functional calculations of warm dense matter often use the Mermin-Kohn-Sham (MKS) scheme at finite temperature, but employ ground-state approximations to the exchange-correlation (XC) free energy. In the simplest solvable non-trivial model, an asymmetric Hubbard dimer, we calculate the exact many-body energies, the exact Mermin-Kohn-Sham functionals for this system, and extract the exact XC free energy. For moderate temperatures and weak correlation, we show this approximation is excellent, but fails for stronger correlations. We plot various free energy correlation components and the adiabatic connection formula.
In this dissertation, I introduce both ground-state and thermal density functional theory. Throughout I use the asymmetric two-site Hubbard model, called the Hubbard dimer for short, to better understand and/or develop these theories. This model is used because it can be solved analytically and it contains all the necessary physics while still being conceptually simple enough to tease apart the various aspects of density functional theory. Ground-statedensity functional theory has seen broad use in many disciplines including physics, chemistry, geology, and material science and has led to a number of important physical and technological successes. In the first two chapters I elucidate the behavior of the ground-state theory using the Hubbard dimer. The simplicity of the model allows me to showcase aspects of the theory that are common points of confusion within the electronic structure community, e.g. the fundamental gap problem. The next two chapters focus on thermal density functional theory which has been coming to prominence as the study of warm dense matter has becomea growing interest at the national laboratories and in the astronomical body community. The Hubbard dimer allows me to do the first ever exact thermal density functional theory calculation. In this work I am better able to understand the approximations used in thermal density functional theory and can point to why they succeed and fail. This also allows me to illustrate old conditions and derive new ones. I conclude with an overview of the work and a few different directions in which the asymmetric Hubbard dimer could be used further.
It is common wisdom that a better understanding of how to quantify electron correlation should lead to more efficient treatments of the correlation problem. Here, we not only substantiate this view but turn it into a concrete, systematic framework for ground states. Since prominent correlation measures such as the nonfreeness depend only on the one-particle reduced density matrix, modeling the correlation energy as a function of such a measure naturally places the framework within reduced density matrix functional theory, while keeping the cost at mean-field level. Strikingly, the variable conjugate to the measure emerges as a ``correlation temperature'', thereby connecting correlation measures, functional theory, and effective temperatures. The framework rationalizes methods such as i-DMFT, and we illustrate its key concepts analytically for the Hubbard dimer and numerically for small molecular systems. This brings a fundamental question within reach: how much of the correlation problem can be solved at mean-field cost?
The thermodynamics of the inhomogeneous one-dimensional repulsive fermionic Hubbard model with parabolic confinement is studied by a density-functional-theory approach, based on Mermin's generalization to finite temperatures. A local-density approximation (LDA), based on exact results for the homogeneous model, is used to approximate the correlation part in the Helmholtz free-energy, comprising the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz LDA (TBALDA). The general presentation of the method is given and some properties of the homogeneous model that are relevant to the DFT approach are analyzed. Extensive comparison between TBALDA and numerical exact diagonalization results for thermodynamic properties of small inhomogeneous chains is discussed. In the remaining, a classical thermodynamic treatment of the confined system is developed with the focus on global properties of large systems. It is observed that, depending on the temperature and specific volume, the system can have its temperature increased under isentropic expansion. Such unusual behavior becomes more pronounced with the increase of the intrasite interaction UUU and can be understood considering the peculiar behavior of the correlation entropy per site of the Hubbard model around half-filling. A related nonmonotonic variation of the temperature under isentropic change of UUU is also studied. At the end, the dependence of the double occupancy on temperature and volume per particle is discussed.