Configurational forces in electronic structure calculations using Kohn-Sham density functional theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified variational framework for calculating atomic forces and stress tensors in Kohn-Sham density functional theory, accurately accounting for Pulay corrections and applicable to both pseudopotential and all-electron calculations.

Contribution

It presents a novel variational formulation of configurational forces in Kohn-Sham DFT that inherently includes Pulay corrections and is suitable for reduced-order scaling techniques.

Findings

Demonstrates high accuracy of forces and stresses in benchmark calculations.

Shows convergence rates of finite-element discretization for various materials.

Validates force calculations on large systems like aluminum nanoclusters and alkane chains.

Abstract

We derive the expressions for configurational forces in Kohn-Sham density functional theory, which correspond to the generalized variational force computed as the derivative of the Kohn-Sham energy functional with respect to the position of a material point $\textbf{x}$. These configurational forces that result from the inner variations of the Kohn-Sham energy functional provide a unified framework to compute atomic forces as well as stress tensor for geometry optimization. Importantly, owing to the variational nature of the formulation, these configurational forces inherently account for the Pulay corrections. The formulation presented in this work treats both pseudopotential and all-electron calculations in single framework, and employs a local variational real-space formulation of Kohn-Sham DFT expressed in terms of the non-orthogonal wavefunctions that is amenable to reduced-order scaling techniques. We demonstrate the accuracy and performance of the proposed configurational force approach on benchmark all-electron and pseudopotential calculations conducted using higher-order finite-element discretization. To this end, we examine the rates of convergence of the finite-element discretization in the computed forces and stresses for various materials systems, and, further, verify the accuracy from finite-differencing the energy. Wherever applicable, we also compare the forces and stresses with those obtained from Kohn-Sham DFT calculations employing plane-wave basis (pseudopotential calculations) and Gaussian basis (all-electron calculations). Finally, we verify the accuracy of the forces on large materials systems involving a metallic aluminum nanocluster containing 666 atoms and an alkane chain containing 902 atoms, where the Kohn-Sham electronic ground state is computed using a reduced-order scaling subspace projection technique (P. Motamarri and V. Gavini, Phys. Rev. B 90, 115127).