Applications of coordinate-scaling procedures to the exchange-correlation energy

The Role of the Reduced Laplacian Renormalization in the Kinetic Energy Functional Development

The Laplacian of the electronic density diverges at the nuclear cusp, which complicates the development of Laplacian-level meta-GGA (LLMGGA) kinetic energy functionals for all-electron calculations. Here, we investigate some Laplacian renormalization methods, which avoid this divergence. We developed two different LLMGGA functionals, which improve the kinetic energy or the kinetic potential. We test these KE functionals in the context of Frozen-Density-Embedding (FDE), for a large palette of non-covalently interacting molecular systems. These functionals improve over the present state-of-the-art LLMGGA functionals for the FDE calculations.

Prediction of electronic excited states of adsorbates on metal surfaces from first principles

We present the first ab initio prediction of localized electronic excited states in a periodically infinite condensed phase, a heretofore intractable goal. In particular, we examined local excitations within a CO molecule adsorbed on Pd(111). The calculation allows a configuration interaction treatment of a local region, while its interaction with the extended condensed phase is described via an embedding potential obtained from periodic density functional theory. Our work lays the foundation of a microscopic understanding of photochemistry and spectroscopy on metal surfaces.