Abstract
We present an alternative to the Kohn-Sham formulation of density-functional theory for the ground-state properties of strongly interacting electronic systems. The idea is to start from the limit of zero kinetic energy and systematically expand the universal energy functional of the density in powers of a “coupling constant” that controls the magnitude of the kinetic energy. The problem of minimizing the energy is reduced to the solution of a strictly correlated electron problem in the presence of an effective potential, which in our theory plays the same role as the Kohn-Sham potential plays in the traditional formulation. We discuss several schemes for approximating the energy functional, and report preliminary results for low-density quantum dots.
- Received 5 August 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.166402
©2009 American Physical Society
Synopsis
Theory tackles strong interactions
Published 19 October 2009
An alternative approach in density-functional theory addresses the effects of strong correlations in many-particle quantum systems.
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