Electronic structure calculations and molecular dynamics simulations with linear system-size scaling

An algorithm for first-principles electronic structure calculations having a computational cost which scales linearly with the system size is presented. Our method exploits the real-space localization of the density matrix, and in this respect it is related to the technique of Li, Nunes and Vanderbilt. The density matrix is expressed in terms of localized support functions, and a matrix of variational parameters, L, having a finite spatial range. The total energy is minimized...

We analyze the problem of determining the electronic ground state within O(N) schemes, focusing on methods in which the total energy is minimized with respect to the density matrix. We note that in such methods a crucially important constraint is that the density matrix must be idempotent (i.e. its eigenvalues must all be zero or unity). Working within orthogonal tight-binding theory, we analyze two related methods for imposing this constraint: the iterative purification stra...

With the continuous growth of processing power for scientific computing, first principles Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are becoming increasingly popular for the study of a wide range of problems in materials science, chemistry and biology. Nevertheless, the computational cost still remains prohibitively large in many cases, particularly in comparison to classical MD simulations using empirical force fields. Here we show how to circumvent the major comp...

Linear scaling density functional theory approaches to electronic structure are often based on the tendency of electrons to localize even in large atomic and molecular systems. However, in many cases of actual interest, for example in semiconductor nanocrystals, system sizes can reach very large extension before significant electron localization sets in and the scaling of the numerical methods may deviate strongly from linear. Here, we address this class of systems, by develo...

Locality of compact one-electron orbitals expanded strictly in terms of local subsets of basis functions can be exploited in density functional theory (DFT) to achieve linear growth of computation time with systems size, crucial in large-scale simulations. However, despite advantages of compact orbitals the development of practical orbital-based linear-scaling DFT methods has long been hindered because a compact representation of the electronic ground state is difficult to fi...

We present KITE, a general purpose open-source tight-binding software for accurate real-space simulations of electronic structure and quantum transport properties of large-scale molecular and condensed systems with tens of billions of atomic orbitals (N~10^10). KITE's core is written in C++, with a versatile Python-based interface, and is fully optimised for shared memory multi-node CPU architectures, thus scalable, efficient and fast. At the core of KITE is a seamless spectr...

The need for large-scale electronic structure calculations arises recently in the field of material physics and efficient and accurate algebraic methods for large simultaneous linear equations become greatly important. We investigate the generalized shifted conjugate orthogonal conjugate gradient method, the generalized Lanczos method and the generalized Arnoldi method. They are the solver methods of large simultaneous linear equations of one-electron Schr\"odinger equation a...

An energy functional for orbital based $O(N)$ calculations is proposed, which depends on a number of non orthogonal, localized orbitals larger than the number of occupied states in the system, and on a parameter, the electronic chemical potential, determining the number of electrons. We show that the minimization of the functional with respect to overlapping localized orbitals can be performed so as to attain directly the ground state energy, without being trapped at local mi...

A linear-algebraic theory called 'multiple Arnoldi method' is presented and realizes large-scale (order-N) electronic structure calculation with generalized eigen-value equations. A set of linear equations, in the form of (zS-H) x = b, are solved simultaneously with multiple Krylov subspaces. The method is implemented in a simulation package ELSES (http://www.elses.jp) with tight-binding-form Hamiltonians. A finite-temperature molecular dynamics simulation is carried out for ...

The implementation of the orbital minimization method (OMM) for solving the self-consistent Kohn-Sham (KS) problem for electronic structure calculations in a basis of non-orthogonal numerical atomic orbitals of finite-range is reported. We explore the possibilities for using the OMM as an exact cubic-scaling solver for the KS problem, and compare its performance with that of explicit diagonalization in realistic systems. We analyze the efficiency of the method depending on th...