Addition and removal energies of circular quantum dots.

We present and compare several many-body methods as applied to two-dimensional quantum dots with circular symmetry. We calculate the approximate ground state energy using a harmonic oscillator basis optimized by Hartree-Fock (HF) theory and further improve the ground state energy using two post-HF methods: in-medium similarity renormalization group and coupled cluster with singles and doubles. With the application of quasidegenerate perturbation theory or the equations-of-motion method to the results of the previous two methods, we obtain addition and removal energies as well. Our results are benchmarked against full configuration interaction and diffusion Monte Carlo where available. We examine the rate of convergence and perform extrapolations to the infinite basis limit using a power-law model.

Magnetic-Field Density-Functional Theory (BDFT): Lessons from the Adiabatic Connection.

We study the effects of magnetic fields in the context of magnetic field density-functional theory (BDFT), where the energy is a functional of the electron density ρ and the magnetic field B. We show that this approach is a worthwhile alternative to current-density functional theory (CDFT) and may provide a viable route to the study of many magnetic phenomena using density-functional theory (DFT). The relationship between BDFT and CDFT is developed and clarified within the framework of the four-way correspondence of saddle functions and their convex and concave parents in convex analysis. By decomposing the energy into its Kohn-Sham components, we demonstrate that the magnetizability is mainly determined by those energy components that are related to the density. For existing density functional approximations, this implies that, for the magnetizability, improvements of the density will be more beneficial than introducing a magnetic-field dependence in the correlation functional. However, once a good charge density is achieved, we show that high accuracy is likely only obtainable by including magnetic-field dependence. We demonstrate that adiabatic-connection (AC) curves at different field strengths resemble one another closely provided each curve is calculated at the equilibrium geometry of that field strength. In contrast, if all AC curves are calculated at the equilibrium geometry of the field-free system, then the curves change strongly with increasing field strength due to the increasing importance of static correlation. This holds also for density functional approximations, for which we demonstrate that the main error encountered in the presence of a field is already present at zero field strength, indicating that density-functional approximations may be applied to systems in strong fields, without the need to treat additional static correlation.

The importance of current contributions to shielding constants in density-functional theory.

The sources of error in the calculation of nuclear-magnetic-resonance shielding constants determined by density-functional theory are examined. Highly accurate Kohn-Sham wave functions are obtained from coupled-cluster electron density functions and used to define accurate-but current independent-density-functional shielding constants. These new reference values, in tandem with high-accuracy coupled-cluster shielding constants, provide a benchmark for the assessment of errors in common density-functional approximations. In particular the role of errors arising in the diamagnetic and paramagnetic terms is investigated, with particular emphasis on the role of current-dependence in the latter. For carbon and nitrogen the current correction is found to be, in some cases, larger than 10 ppm. This indicates that the absence of this correction in general purpose exchange-correlation functionals is one of the main sources of error in shielding calculations using density functional theory. It is shown that the current correction improves the shielding performance of many popular approximate DFT functionals.