Density functional theory for comprehensive orbital energy calculations

This study reveals the reason core 1s orbital energies and the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energies of hydrogen and rare gas atoms are underestimated by long-range corrected (LC) density functional theory (DFT), which quantitatively reproduces the HOMO energies of other systems and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) energies. Applying the pseudospectral regional (PR) self-interaction correction (SIC) drastically improved the underestimated orbital energies in LC-DFT calculations, while maintaining or improving the accuracies in the calculated valence HOMO and LUMO energies. This indicates that the self-interaction error in exchange functionals causes the underestimations of core 1s orbital energies and the HOMO energies of hydrogen and rare gas atoms in LC-DFT calculations. To clarify the reason for the improvement, the fractional occupation dependences of total electronic energies and orbital energies were examined. The calculated results clearly showed that the LC-PR functional gives almost linear dependences of total electronic energies for a slight decrease in the occupation number of core 1s orbitals, although this linear dependence disappears for significant decrease due to the shrinking of exchange self-interaction regions. It was also clarified that the PRSIC hardly affects the occupation number dependences of the total electronic energies and orbital energies for the fractional occupations of HOMOs and LUMOs. As a result, it was concluded that core orbital energies are obtained accurately by combining LC-DFT with PRSIC.