# RPA calculation of the cohesive energy of Si¶

In this exercise we will use GPAW to calculate the cohesive energy of silicon. When calculating total energies, we shall split the exchange-correlation energy into an “exact” exchange contribution and calculate the remaining correlation energy in the random-phase approximation (RPA). A comprehesive introduction to the RPA can be found in [Ren], and you are also advised to look at this page.

Note

RPA calculations are typically rather time-consuming, so in this exercise we shall cut a few corners!

We obtain the cohesive energy $$E_\text{coh}$$ of silicon as

$E_\text{coh} = E_\text{at} - 0.5 E_\text{bulk}$

where $$E_\text{at}$$ is the total energy of an isolated silicon atom, and $$E_\text{bulk}$$ is the total energy per primitive unit cell of bulk silicon. Do you know where the factor of 0.5 comes from?

In DFT, we partition the total energy as

$E_\text{DFT} = E_\text{Kin} + E_\text{ie} + E_\text{ii} + E_\text{Hartree} + E_\text{XC}$

The purpose of this exercise is to explore different approximations for the exchange-correlation energy, $$E_\text{XC}$$.

## PBE cohesive energy - bulk¶

We start with a generalized-gradient approximation to $$E_\text{XC}$$ using the PBE functional:

$E_\text{XC} = E_\text{PBE}$

The script si.pbe.py calculates the total energy of bulk silicon. The only parameters we need to choose are the plane-wave cutoff (i.e. number of plane waves in our basis set to describe the electron wavefunctions), the k-point sampling of the Brillouin zone, and the lattice parameter of Si. We could calculate the lattice parameter ourselves from first principles, but in order to compare to previous calculations, we instead choose the experimental value of 5.421 Ang [Harl].

Make sure you understand what the script is doing, and then try running it. Note that the calculation is not very heavy (it should take less than a minute on a single CPU). This reflects the fact that PBE is a (semi)-local functional of the density, and also that even with a high plane-wave cutoff, the small unit cell means we do not end up requiring many plane-waves to describe the system.

## PBE cohesive energy - atom¶

To complete the calculation of the cohesive energy, we need the total energy of an isolated Si atom. In contrast to the bulk case, these calculations are expensive even with the PBE functional. The reason is that our calculations use periodic boundary conditions, leading to unphysical interactions between replicas of the isolated atom. We can effectively remove this interaction placing the atom in a cubic unit cell of side length $$L$$, and increase $$L$$ until the replicas no longer see each other. Unfortunately, the larger the value of $$L$$, the more plane waves we have, which slows down the calculation considerably.

Therefore, for the purpose of this exercise, we shall not actually perform the calculations on the isolated Si atom - instead just provide the numbers as reference data. In the next section a sample script will be given to show how to generate the following numbers:

$$L(\AA)$$

$$E_\text{PBE}$$ (eV)

6.0

-0.664402266578

7.0

-0.778484948334

8.0

-0.82500272946

9.0

-0.841856681349

10.0

-0.848092042293

11.0

-0.850367362642

12.0

-0.85109735188

The first column gives the side length (in Angstroms) of the simulation cell containing the isolated atom, and the second gives the total energy in eV.

From the above data and your own calculations, calculate the cohesive energy of silicon using the PBE functional to describe exchange-correlation. Compare your result to the value of 4.55 eV reported in [Olsen].

Note

The total energy delivered by GPAW is not an absolute value, but rather given with respect to a reference energy. It turns out that in this case, the reference energies cancel when calculating the cohesive energy, so we can forget about it here. If in doubt, you can look for the line “reference = … in the GPAW output file.

## EXX@PBE cohesive energy - bulk¶

We now try a different approximation for the exchange-correlation energy, which is

$E_\text{XC} = E_\text{EXX}$

An expression for the exact exchange energy $$E_\text{EXX}$$ can be found e.g. in equation (9) of [Olsen]. The main points to note are that:

• it is fully nonlocal - to get the energy we must integrate over $$\mathbf{r}$$ and $$\mathbf{r}'$$, which is expensive.

• it requires knowledge of the wavefunctions, not just the density, which again makes it more expensive to compute.

• in the formalism used here we calculate $$E_\text{EXX}$$ non-self-consistently; that is, we use one approximation for the exchange-correlation energy (PBE) to obtain the wavefunctions, then use these wavefunctions to construct the exchange energy under a different approximation. As a result, this method is described as EXX@PBE; had we used LDA to obtain the wavefunctions, we would have EXX@LDA etc.

• How might a self-consistent calculation of the exchange energy compare to the Hartree-Fock method?

In order to obtain $$E_\text{EXX}$$ from GPAW, we need to import the EXX class from exx.py in our script. The calculate method performs the calculation of the exchange energy, while the get_total_energy method returns the total energy of our system with $$E_\text{XC}=E_\text{EXX}$$.

The script si_pbe_exx.py calculates the total energy of bulk Si in the EXX@PBE approximation. The calculation proceeds in two parts - first, a PBE calculation which is identical to that of the previous section. Second, the exchange part. This part is much slower, and it is a good idea to run on a few processors - it takes about 5 minutes on 4 CPUs.

The output file si.pbe+exx.exx_output.txt gives the details of the exchange calculation and a breakdown of the exchange energy in terms of the contributions from the core and valence electrons. However for the purpose of calculating the cohesive energy the quantity returned by the get_total_energy method and printed in si.pbe+exx.results.txt is more useful.

## EXX@PBE cohesive energy - atom¶

As before, we also need the energy of the isolated atom. Look at (but don’t run!) the script atom/si.atom.pbe+exx.py, which returns the following output in pbe_and_exx_energies.txt:

#Box_side_length(A) PBE_total_energy(eV) PBE+EXX_total_energy(eV)
6.0 -0.665810338359 9.88551793188
7.0 -0.779861449204 9.79892076652
8.0 -0.825944184466 9.76642864072
9.0 -0.843144851642 9.75592425952
10.0 -0.849110419847 9.7528049568
11.0 -0.851370368753 9.7518000647
12.0 -0.852243293624 9.75141580104
13.0 -0.852570610869 9.75125973558


Note that atom/si.atom.pbe+exx.py also contains some additional tweaking not required for the bulk calculation, most importantly spin-polarization; by Hund’s rules, we expect a spin-polarized atom to be more stable than the non-spin-polarized case.

You now have enough information to calculate the cohesive energy in the EXX@PBE approximation. Compare your value to that of 2.82 eV given in [Olsen]. This number is dramatically different to the experimental value of 4.68 eV, and highlights the danger of neglecting correlation in solids!

## (RPA+EXX)@PBE cohesive energy - bulk¶

Finally, we calculate $$E_\text{XC}$$ including the correlation energy in the RPA:

$E_\text{XC} = E_\text{EXX} + E_\text{RPA}$

An expression for $$E_\text{RPA}$$ is given as equation (8) in [Olsen].

The main ingredient here is the response function $$\chi_0$$, which is nonlocal, energy dependent and constructed from a sum of an infinite number of unoccupied electronic states. Therefore like GW calculations, RPA calculations are expensive to perform. We also note that, like for exact exchange, we construct $$\chi_0$$ non-self-consistently, here using the wavefunctions and eigenvalues obtained with the PBE functional.

The good news however is that compared to exact exchange calculations, the RPA correlation energy tends to converge faster with respect to the number of k-points and also the number of plane waves used to describe $$\chi_0$$, so we can use a lighter computational setup. Furthermore, there exists an empirical fix to the problem of the unoccupied states which turns out to work rather well (more details below).

Like for exact exchange, the first part of our RPA calculation is performed at the PBE level to obtain the ground state density. We then use this density to obtain the wavefunctions both of the occupied and some of the unoccupied states. The script si.rpa_init_pbe.py performs this step; note it is essentially identical to si.pbe.py apart from the all-important diagonalize_full_hamiltonian line. However note that we have reduced the k-point grid to a 4x4x4 sampling.

Having performed this step (which should take ~1 minute on 4 CPUs) we now calculate the correlation energy using si.rpa.py, which imports the RPACorrelation class from rpa.py. All the computational details are read from the bulk.gpw file; the only input we need specify is the number of plane waves used to describe $$\chi_0$$. Here we give a list of values, which means that the correlation energy will be calculated for each plane-wave cutoff (in eV). The reason for this procedure is described below. Note that in principle we also need to specify the number of unoccupied bands used in the construction of $$\chi_0$$ - however here this choice is made by the code, and sets the number of bands to equal the number of plane waves describing $$\chi_0$$. Now, run si.rpa.py (4 minutes, 4 CPUs).

Studying the output file si.rpa.rpa_output.txt, we see that the code calculates the contribution from each q point sequentially. In fact by specifying the filename attribute of the RPACorrelation object we can generate a restart file which allows GPAW to pick up from an interrupted calculation. Once the contributions from all the q points have been calculated, they are summed together with the appropriate q-point weights to construct the correlation energy. The correlation energy for each plane-wave cutoff is printed near the end of the output file, under Total correlation energy. You should see that changing the plane wave cutoff from 80 to 164 eV changes the correlation energy by over 1 eV.

## (RPA+EXX)@PBE cohesive energy - convergence¶

In order to converge the correlation energy, we should increase the plane-wave cutoff describing $$\chi_0$$ (and implicitly, the number of empty states). However it is noted in [Harl] that for the electron gas, one expects the correlation energy to scale as

$E_\text{RPA}(E_{cut}) = E_\text{RPA}(\infty) + A E_{cut}^{-1.5}$

where $$E_{cut}$$ is the plane-wave cutoff describing $$\chi_0$$. Empirically, this expression seems to work beyond the electron gas.

Test this expression for silicon by plotting the correlation energy against $$E_{cut}^{-1.5}$$; the intercept of the straight line should give $$E_\text{RPA}(\infty)$$. GPAW tries to guess this intercept by extrapolating straight lines between pairs of points, and outputs the result under Extrapolated energies. How do they compare to your result?

## (RPA+EXX)@PBE cohesive energy - atom¶

The corresponding scripts for the isolated atom are atom/si.atom.rpa_init_pbe.py and atom/si.atom.rpa.py. Note how, thanks to the large simulation cell, we end up requiring almost 10000 bands for the calculation; that’s a lot of effort for a single atom! The reference output file is atom/si.atom.rpa_output.txt. Use the data in this output file to obtain the extrapolated correlation energy for the single atom.

Combining the correlation energies with the EXX@PBE calculations of the previous section, you should now be able to calculate the cohesive energy of silicon using exact exchange and the RPA correlation energy.

• Compare the result of using the extrapolated correlation energies with that at a fixed cutoff of 164 eV.

• Compare your value to that of 4.32 eV given in [Olsen] and the experimental value, 4.68 eV.

## Conclusions¶

After all that work, it seems that the method that gave us the cohesive energy closest to experiment turns out to be the simplest we tried - the generalized-gradient PBE functional. Indeed, according to table VII of [Harl], PBE outperforms EXX and RPA for a wide range of materials. The strength of the RPA lies in its ability to describe long-range correlation effects, e.g. in systems exhibiting van der Waals bonds. Unfortunately, the complexity of these systems does not allow us to study them in a quick exercise like this one. Nonetheless the procedure of calculating the total energy employed above is exactly the same when applied to more complicated systems.

In order to get a consistent, high-quality description of both long-range and short-range correlation it is desirable to move beyond the RPA - but that’s another story…

## References¶

Ren

Ren et al., J. Mater. Sci. 47, 7447 (2012)

Harl(1,2,3)

Harl, Schimka and Kresse, Phys. Rev. B 81, 115126 (2010)

Olsen(1,2,3,4,5)

Olsen and Thygesen, Phys. Rev. B 87, 075111 (2013)