Adaptive Riemannian metric for all-electron calculations

Fast solution of elliptic partial differential equations using linear combinations of plane waves

Given an arbitrary elliptic partial differential equation (PDE), a procedure for obtaining its solution is proposed based on the method of Ritz: the solution is written as a linear combination of plane waves and the coefficients are obtained by variational minimization. The PDE to be solved is cast as a system of linear equations Ax=b, where the matrix A is not sparse, which prevents the straightforward application of standard iterative methods in order to solve it. This sparseness problem can be circumvented by means of a recursive bisection approach based on the fast Fourier transform, which makes it possible to implement fast versions of some stationary iterative methods (such as Gauss-Seidel) consuming O(NlogN) memory and executing an iteration in O(Nlog(2)N) time, N being the number of plane waves used. In a similar way, fast versions of Krylov subspace methods and multigrid methods can also be implemented. These procedures are tested on Poisson's equation expressed in adaptive coordinates. It is found that the best results are obtained with the GMRES method using a multigrid preconditioner with Gauss-Seidel relaxation steps.

Variational solution of Poisson's equation using plane waves in adaptive coordinates

A procedure for solving Poisson's equation using plane waves in adaptive coordinates (u) is described. The method, based on Gygi's work, writes a trial potential ξ as the product of a preselected Coulomb weight μ times a plane-wave expansion depending on u. Then, the Coulomb potential generated by a given density ρ is obtained by variationally optimizing ξ, so that the error in the Coulomb energy is second-order with respect to the error in ξ. The Coulomb weight μ is chosen to provide to each ξ the typical long-range tail of a Coulomb potential, so that calculations on atoms and molecules are made possible without having to resort to the supercell approximation. As a proof of concept, the method is tested on the helium atom and the H_{2} and H_{3}^{+} molecules, where Hartree-Fock energies with better than milli-Hartree accuracy require only a moderate number of plane waves.

Multielectron effects in high harmonic generation in N2 and benzene: simulation using a non-adiabatic quantum molecular dynamics approach for laser-molecule interactions

A mixed quantum-classical approach is introduced which allows the dynamical response of molecules driven far from equilibrium to be modeled. This method is applied to the interaction of molecules with intense, short-duration laser pulses. The electronic response of the molecule is described using time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) and the resulting Kohn-Sham equations are solved numerically using finite difference techniques in conjunction with local and global adaptations of an underlying grid in curvilinear coordinates. Using this approach, simulations can be carried out for a wide range of molecules and both all-electron and pseudopotential calculations are possible. The approach is applied to the study of high harmonic generation in N(2) and benzene using linearly polarized laser pulses and, to the best of our knowledge, the results for benzene represent the first TDDFT calculations of high harmonic generation in benzene using linearly polarized laser pulses. For N(2) an enhancement of the cut-off harmonics is observed whenever the laser polarization is aligned perpendicular to the molecular axis. This enhancement is attributed to the symmetry properties of the Kohn-Sham orbital that responds predominantly to the pulse. In benzene we predict that a suppression in the cut-off harmonics occurs whenever the laser polarization is aligned parallel to the molecular plane. We attribute this suppression to the symmetry-induced response of the highest-occupied molecular orbital.