Exact ensemble density functional theory for excited states in a model system: investigating the weight dependence of the correlation energy

TL;DR

This paper develops an exact ensemble density functional theory for a model system, revealing the weight dependence of correlation energy and analyzing the accuracy of various approximations in different correlation regimes.

Contribution

It constructs an exact eDFT for the asymmetric Hubbard dimer, providing analytical expressions and insights into the weight dependence of ensemble xc energies across correlation regimes.

Findings

Exact analytical expression for weight-dependent exchange energy.

Discontinuities in ensemble xc potential in strongly correlated limit.

Ground-state functionals perform well in weakly correlated regimes, but less so in strongly correlated regimes.

Abstract

Ensemble density functional theory (eDFT) is an exact time-independent alternative to time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) for the calculation of excitation energies. Despite its formal simplicity and advantages in contrast to TD-DFT (multiple excitations, for example, can be easily taken into account in an ensemble), eDFT is not standard which is essentially due to the lack of reliable approximate exchange-correlation (xc) functionals for ensembles. Following Smith et al. [Phys. Rev. B 93, 245131 (2016)], we propose in this work to construct an exact eDFT for the nontrivial asymmetric Hubbard dimer, thus providing more insight into the weight dependence of the ensemble xc energy in various correlation regimes. For that purpose, an exact analytical expression for the weight-dependent ensemble exchange energy has been derived. The complementary exact ensemble correlation energy has been computed by means of Legendre--Fenchel transforms. Interesting features like discontinuities in the ensemble xc potential in the strongly correlated limit have been rationalized by means of a generalized adiabatic connection formalism. Finally, functional-driven errors induced by ground-state density-functional approximations have been studied. In the strictly symmetric case or in the weakly correlated regime, combining ensemble exact exchange with ground-state correlation functionals gives relatively accurate ensemble energies. However, when approaching the equiensemble in the strongly correlated regime, this approximation leads to highly curved ensemble energies with negative slope which is unphysical. Using both ground-state exchange and correlation functionals gives much better results in that case. In fact, exact ensemble energies are almost recovered in some density domains. The analysis of density-driven errors is left for future work.