First‐principles treatment of strongly correlated systems is currently regarded as one of greatest challenges in theoretical chemistry and condensed matter physics. While great efforts have been invested to extend current electronic structure theories to treat strong correlation, there is also increasing interest in combining first‐principles approaches with model Hamiltonians to take advantage of the best of the two theoretical frameworks. This short review aims at giving an overview of first‐principles approaches that are currently used for strongly correlated materials, and remarking on their underlying physical ideas and theoretical limitations. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
ComDMFT is a parallel computational package designed to study the electronic structure of correlated quantum materials from first principles. Our approach is based on the combination of first-principles methods and dynamical mean field theories. In version 2.0, we implemented fully-diagrammatic GW+EDMFT from first-principles. In this approach, correlated electrons are treated within full GW+EDMFT and the rest are treated within full-GW, seamlessly. This implementation enables the electronic structure calculation of quantum materials with weak, intermediate, and strong electron correlation without prior knowledge of the degree of electron correlation.
The last several decades have seen significant advances in the theoretical modeling of materials within the fields of solid-state physics and materials science, but many methods commonly applied to this problem struggle to capture strong electron correlation accurately. Recent widespread interest in quantum materials -- where strong correlation plays a crucial role in the quantum effects governing their behavior -- further highlights the need for theoretical methods capable of rigorously treating such correlation. Here, we present a periodic generalization of variational two-electron reduced density matrix (2-RDM) theory, a bootstrapping-type method that minimizes the ground-state energy as a functional of the 2-RDM without relying on the wavefunction. The 2-RDM is computed directly by semidefinite programming with
N-representability conditions, ensuring accurate treatment of strongly correlated electronic systems. By exploiting translational symmetry, we significantly reduce computational scaling, enabling applications to realistic materials-scale systems. Additionally, we introduce an alternative to conventional energy band structures: natural-orbital occupation-number bands, which, being independent of mean-field assumptions, offer deeper insights into electron correlation effects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by applying the theory to hydrogen chains, molybdenum disulfide, and nickel oxide, showing that natural-orbital occupation bands correctly capture electronic character in regimes where density functional theory fails. This work represents a major step toward accurately describing the electronic structure of quantum materials using reduced density matrices rather than wavefunctions.