Linear dielectric response of an extended system¶

A short introduction¶

The DielectricFunction object can calculate the dielectric function of an extended system from its ground state electronic structure. The frequency and wave-vector dependent linear dielectric matrix in reciprocal space representation is written as

$\epsilon_{\mathbf{G} \mathbf{G}^{\prime}}(\mathbf{q}, \omega)$

where $$\mathbf{q}$$ and $$\omega$$ are the momentum and energy transfer in an excitation, and $$\mathbf{G}$$ is reciprocal lattice vector. The off-diagonal element of $$\epsilon_{\mathbf{G} \mathbf{G}^{\prime}}$$ determines the local field effect.

The macroscopic dielectric function is defined by (with local field correction)

$\epsilon_{M}(\mathbf{q},\omega) = \frac{1}{\epsilon^{-1}_{00}(\mathbf{q},\omega)}$

Ignoring the local field (the off-diagonal element of dielectric matrix) results in:

$\epsilon_{M}(\mathbf{q},\omega) = \epsilon_{00}(\mathbf{q},\omega)$

Optical absorption spectrum is obtained through

$\mathrm{ABS} = \mathrm{Im} \epsilon_{M}(\mathbf{q} \rightarrow 0,\omega)$

Electron energy loss spectrum (EELS) is get by

$\mathrm{EELS} = -\mathrm{Im} \frac{1}{\epsilon_{M}(\mathbf{q},\omega)}$

The macroscopic dielectric function is ill defined for systems of reduced dimensionality. In these cases $$\epsilon_M = 1.0$$. The polarizability will maintain its structure for lower dimensionalities and is in 3D related to the macroscopic dielectric function as,

$\mathrm{Im} \epsilon_{M}(\mathbf{q},\omega) = 4 \, \pi \, \mathrm{Im} \alpha_M(\mathbf{q},\omega)$

Refer to Linear dielectric response of an extended system: theory for detailed documentation on theoretical part.

Frequency grid¶

The dielectric function is evaluted on a non-linear frequency grid according to the formula

$\omega_i = i \frac{\Delta\omega_0} {1 -(\sqrt2 - 1)\frac{\Delta\omega_0}{\omega_2} i}, i = 0, 1, ...,$

The parameter $$\Delta\omega_0$$ is the frequency spacing at $$\omega=0$$ and $$\omega_2$$ is the frequency where the spacing has increased to $$2\Delta\omega_0$$. In general a lower value of $$\omega_2$$ gives a more non- linear grid and less frequency points.

Below, the frequency grid is visualized for different values of $$\omega_2$$. You can find the script for reproducing this figure here: plot_freq.py.

The parameters can be specified using keyword arguments:

df = DielectricFunction(...,
domega0=0.05,   # eV. Default = 0.1
omega2=5.0,     # Default = 10.0
omegamax=15.0)  # eV. Default is the maximum
#  difference between energy
#  eigenvalues


Setting omegamax manually is usually not advisable, however you might want it in cases where semi-core states are included where very large energy eigenvalue differences appear.

Example 1: Optical absorption of semiconductor: Bulk silicon¶

A simple startup¶

Here is a minimum script to get an absorption spectrum.

import numpy as np
from ase.build import bulk
from gpaw import GPAW
from gpaw.response.df import DielectricFunction

# Part 1: Ground state calculation
atoms = bulk('Si', 'diamond', a=5.431)   # Generate diamond crystal structure for silicon
calc = GPAW(mode='pw', kpts=(4,4,4))     # GPAW calculator initialization

atoms.set_calculator(calc)
atoms.get_potential_energy()             # Ground state calculation is performed
calc.write('si.gpw', 'all')              # Use 'all' option to write wavefunction

# Part 2 : Spectrum calculation          # DF: dielectric function object
df = DielectricFunction(calc='si.gpw',   # Ground state gpw file (with wavefunction) as input
domega0=0.05)    # Using nonlinear frequency grid
df.get_dielectric_function()             # By default, a file called 'df.csv' is generated



This script takes less than one minute on a single cpu, and generates a file ‘df.csv’ containing the optical ($$\mathbf{q} = 0$$) dielectric function along the x-direction, which is the default direction. The file ‘df.csv’ contain five columns ordered as follows: $$\omega$$ (eV), $$\mathrm{Re}(\epsilon_{\mathrm{NLF}})$$, $$\mathrm{Im}(\epsilon_{\mathrm{NLF}})$$, $$\mathrm{Re}(\epsilon_{\mathrm{LF}})$$, $$\mathrm{Im}(\epsilon_{\mathrm{LF}})$$ where $$\epsilon_{\mathrm{NLF}}$$ and $$\epsilon_{\mathrm{LF}}$$ is the result without and with local field effects, respectively.

For other directions you can specify the direction and filename like:

DielectricFunction.get_dielectric_function(...,
direction='y',
filename='filename.csv',
...)


The absorption spectrum along the x-direction including local field effects can then be plotted using

# Creates: si_abs.png
import numpy as np
from math import pi
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import rc
rc('font', **{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
#rc('text', usetex=True)
rc('figure', figsize=(4.0, 4.0), dpi=800)

# Set plotting range
xmin = 0.1
xmax = 10.0
inds_w = (data[:, 0] >= xmin) & (data[:, 0] <= xmax)

plt.plot(data[inds_w, 0], 4 * pi * data[inds_w, 4])
plt.xlabel('$\\omega / [eV]$')
plt.ylabel('$\\mathrm{Im} \\epsilon(\\omega)$')
plt.savefig('si_abs.png', bbox_inches='tight')


The resulting figure is shown below. Note that there is significant absorption close to $$\omega=0$$ because of the large default Fermi-smearing in GPAW. This will be dealt with in the following more realistic calculation.

More realistic calculation¶

To get a realistic silicon absorption spectrum and macroscopic dielectric constant, one needs to converge the calculations with respect to grid spacing, kpoints, number of bands, planewave cutoff energy and so on. Here is an example script: silicon_ABS.py. In the following, the script is split into different parts for illustration.

1. Ground state calculation
# Creates: mac_eps.csv
# Refer to G. Kresse, Phys. Rev. B 73, 045112 (2006)
# for comparison of macroscopic and microscopic dielectric constant
# and absorption peaks.
from __future__ import print_function
from pathlib import Path

from ase.build import bulk
from ase.parallel import paropen, world

from gpaw import GPAW, FermiDirac
from gpaw.response.df import DielectricFunction

# Ground state calculation
a = 5.431
atoms = bulk('Si', 'diamond', a=a)

calc = GPAW(mode='pw',
kpts={'density': 5.0, 'gamma': True},
parallel={'band': 1, 'domain': 1},
xc='LDA',
occupations=FermiDirac(0.001))  # use small FD smearing

atoms.set_calculator(calc)
atoms.get_potential_energy()  # get ground state density

# Restart Calculation with fixed density and dense kpoint sampling
calc.set(kpts={'density': 15.0, 'gamma': False},  # dense kpoint sampling
fixdensity=True)


In this script a normal ground state calculation is performed with coarse kpoint grid. The calculation is then restarted with a fixed density and the full hamiltonian is diagonalized exactly on a densely sampled kpoint grid. This is the preferred procedure of obtained the excited KS-states because it is in general difficult to converge the excited states using iterative solvers. A full diagonalization is more robust.

Note

For semiconductors, it is better to use either small Fermi-smearing in the ground state calculation:

from gpaw import FermiDirac
calc = GPAW(...
occupations=FermiDirac(0.001),
...)


or larger ftol, which determines the threshold for transition in the dielectric function calculation ($$f_i - f_j > ftol$$), not shown in the example script):

df = DielectricFunction(...
ftol=1e-2,
...)

1. Get absorption spectrum
calc.diagonalize_full_hamiltonian(nbands=70)  # diagonalize Hamiltonian
calc.write('si_large.gpw', 'all')  # write wavefunctions

# Getting absorption spectrum
df = DielectricFunction(calc='si_large.gpw',
eta=0.05,


Here eta is the broadening parameter of the calculation, and ecut is the local field effect cutoff included in the dielectric function.

1. Get macroscopic dielectric constant

The macroscopic dielectric constant is defined as the real part of dielectric function at $$\omega=0$$. In the following script, only a single point at $$\omega=0$$ is calculated without using the hilbert transform (which is only compatible with the non-linear frequency grid specification).

                        ecut=150)
df.get_dielectric_function(filename='si_abs.csv')

# Getting macroscopic constant
df = DielectricFunction(calc='si_large.gpw',
frequencies=[0.0],
hilbert=False,
eta=0.0001,
ecut=150,
)

epsNLF, epsLF = df.get_macroscopic_dielectric_constant()

# Make table
epsrefNLF = 14.08  # from [1] in top
epsrefLF = 12.66  # from [1] in top

with paropen('mac_eps.csv', 'w') as f:
print(' , Without LFE, With LFE', file=f)
print('%s, %.6f, %.6f' % ('GPAW-linear response', epsNLF, epsLF), file=f)
print('%s, %.6f, %.6f' % ('[1]', epsrefNLF, epsrefLF), file=f)
print('%s, %.6f, %.6f' % ('Exp.', 11.90, 11.90), file=f)

if world.rank == 0:


In general, local field correction will reduce this value by 10-20%.

Result¶

The figure shown here is generated from script : silicon_ABS.py and plot_ABS.py. It takes 30 minutes with 16 cpus on Intel Xeon X5570 2.93GHz.

The arrows are data extracted from [1].

The calculated macroscopic dielectric constant can be seen in the table below and compare good with the values from [1]. The experimental value is 11.90. The larger theoretical value results from the fact that the ground state LDA (even GGA) calculation underestimates the bandgap.

 Without LFE With LFE GPAW-linear response 13.934931 12.532885 [1] 14.080000 12.660000 Exp. 11.900000 11.900000

Example 2: Electron energy loss spectra¶

Electron energy loss spectra (EELS) can be used to explore the plasmonic (collective electronic) excitations of an extended system. This is because the energy loss of a fast electron passing by a material is defined by

$\mathrm{EELS} = -\mathrm{Im} \frac{1}{\epsilon(\mathbf{q}, \omega)}$

and the plasmon frequency $$\omega_p$$ is defined as when $$\epsilon(\omega_p) \rightarrow 0$$. It means that an external perturbation at this frequency, even infinitesimal, can generate large collective electronic response.

A simple startup: bulk aluminum¶

Here is a minimum script to get an EELS spectrum.

from ase.build import bulk
from gpaw import GPAW
from gpaw.response.df import DielectricFunction

# Part 1: Ground state calculation
atoms = bulk('Al', 'fcc', a=4.043)  # generate fcc crystal structure
# GPAW calculator initialization:
k = 13
calc = GPAW(mode='pw', kpts=(k, k, k))

atoms.set_calculator(calc)
atoms.get_potential_energy()  # ground state calculation is performed
calc.write('Al.gpw', 'all')  # use 'all' option to write wavefunctions

# Part 2: Spectrum calculation
df = DielectricFunction(calc='Al.gpw')  # ground state gpw file as input

# Momentum transfer, must be the difference between two kpoints:
q_c = [1.0 / k, 0, 0]
df.get_eels_spectrum(q_c=q_c)  # by default, an 'eels.csv' file is generated


This script takes less than one minute on a single cpu and by default, generates a file ‘EELS.csv’. Then you can plot the file using

# Creates: aluminum_EELS.png
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot(data[:,0], data[:,2])
plt.savefig('aluminum_EELS.png', bbox_inches='tight')
plt.show()


The three columns of this file correspond to energy (eV), EELS without and with local field correction, respectively. You will see a 15.9 eV peak. It comes from the bulk plasmon excitation of aluminum. You can explore the plasmon dispersion relation $$\omega_p(\mathbf{q})$$ by tuning $$\mathbf{q}$$ in the calculation above.

Note

The momentum transfer $$\mathbf{q}$$ in an EELS calculation must be the difference between two kpoints! For example, if you have an kpts=(Nk1, Nk2, Nk3) Monkhorst-Pack k-sampling in the ground state calculation, you have to choose $$\mathbf{q} = \mathrm{np.array}([i/Nk1, j/Nk2, k/Nk3])$$, where $$i, j, k$$ are integers.

A more sophisticated example: graphite¶

Here is a more sophisticated example of calculating EELS of graphite with different $$\mathbf{q}$$. You can also get the script here: graphite_EELS.py. The results (plot) are shown in the following section.

from __future__ import print_function

from math import sqrt
import numpy as np
from ase import Atoms
from ase.parallel import paropen
from gpaw import GPAW, FermiDirac, PW
from gpaw.response.df import DielectricFunction

# Part 1: Ground state calculation
a = 1.42
c = 3.355

# Generate graphite AB-stack structure:
atoms = Atoms('C4',
scaled_positions=[(1 / 3.0, 1 / 3.0, 0),
(2 / 3.0, 2 / 3.0, 0),
(0, 0, 0.5),
(1 / 3.0, 1 / 3.0, 0.5)],
pbc=(1, 1, 1),
cell=[(sqrt(3) * a / 2, 3 / 2.0 * a, 0),
(-sqrt(3) * a / 2, 3 / 2.0 * a, 0),
(0, 0, 2 * c)])

# Part 2: Find ground state density and diagonalize full hamiltonian
calc = GPAW(mode=PW(500),
kpts=(6, 6, 3),
parallel={'domain': 1},
# Use smaller Fermi-Dirac smearing to avoid intraband transitions:
occupations=FermiDirac(0.05))

atoms.set_calculator(calc)
atoms.get_potential_energy()

calc.set(kpts=(20, 20, 7), fixdensity=True)
atoms.get_potential_energy()

# The result should also be converged with respect to bands:
calc.diagonalize_full_hamiltonian(nbands=60)
calc.write('graphite.gpw', 'all')

# Part 2: Spectra calculations
f = paropen('graphite_q_list', 'w')  # write q

for i in range(1, 6):  # loop over different q
df = DielectricFunction(calc='graphite.gpw',
domega0=0.01,
ecut=100,
# write different output for different q:
txt='out_df_%d.txt' % i)

q_c = [i / 20.0, 0.0, 0.0]  # Gamma - M excitation

df.get_eels_spectrum(q_c=q_c, filename='graphite_EELS_%d' % i)

# Calculate cartesian momentum vector:
cell_cv = atoms.get_cell()
bcell_cv = 2 * np.pi * np.linalg.inv(cell_cv).T
q_v = np.dot(q_c, bcell_cv)
print(sqrt(np.inner(q_v, q_v)), file=f)

f.close()


Results on graphite¶

The figure shown here is generated from script: graphite_EELS.py and plot_EELS.py

One can compare the results with literature [2].

Example 3: Tetrahedron integration (experimental)¶

The k-point integral needed for the calculation of the density response function, is typically performed using a simple summation of individual k-points. By setting the integration mode to ‘tetrahedron integration’ the kpoint integral is calculated by interpolating density matrix elements and eigenvalues. This typically means that fewer k-points are needed for convergence.

The combination of using the tetrahedron method and reducing the kpoint integral using crystal symmetries means that it is necessary to be careful with the kpoint sampling which should span the whole irreducible zone. Luckily, bztools.py provides the tool to generate such an k-point sampling autimatically:

from gpaw.bztools import find_high_symmetry_monkhorst_pack
kpts = find_high_symmetry_monkhorst_pack(
'gs.gpw',  # Path to ground state .gpw file
density=20.0)  # The required minimum density


If the system is lower dimensional this function takes an optional argument pbc a tuple of bools which for slab with a non-periodic z direction is given by pbc=[True, True, False]. If combined with the tetrahedron method it is necessary to tell the DielectricFunction object which directions are non-periodic. The recipe for non-periodic systems is given below:

from gpaw.bztools import find_high_symmetry_monkhorst_pack
from gpaw.response.df import DielectricFunction
pbc = [True, True, False]
kpts = find_high_symmetry_monkhorst_pack(
'gs.gpw',  # Path to ground state .gpw file
density=20.0,  # The required minimum density
pbc=pbc)  # Periodic directions

df = DielectricFunction(...,
integrationmode='tetrahedron integration',
pbc=pbc,
...)


Bulk TaS2¶

As an example, lets calculate the optical properties of a well-known layered material, namely, the transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) 2H-TaS2. We set the structure and find the ground state density with (find the full script here tas2_dielectric_function.py, takes about 10 mins on 8 cores.)

# Creates: tas2_eps.png
from __future__ import division
from ase import Atoms
from ase.lattice.hexagonal import Hexagonal
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from gpaw import GPAW, PW, FermiDirac
from gpaw.response.df import DielectricFunction
from gpaw.mpi import world
from gpaw.bztools import find_high_symmetry_monkhorst_pack

# 1) Ground-state.

a = 3.314
c = 12.1

cell = Hexagonal(symbol='Ta', latticeconstant={'a': a, 'c': c}).get_cell()
atoms = Atoms(symbols='TaS2TaS2', cell=cell, pbc=(1, 1, 1),
scaled_positions=[(0, 0, 1 / 4),
(2 / 3, 1 / 3, 1 / 8),
(2 / 3, 1 / 3, 3 / 8),
(0, 0, 3 / 4),
(-2 / 3, -1 / 3, 5 / 8),
(-2 / 3, -1 / 3, 7 / 8)])

calc = GPAW(mode=PW(600),
xc='PBE',
occupations=FermiDirac(width=0.01),
kpts={'density': 5})

atoms.set_calculator(calc)
atoms.get_potential_energy()
calc.write('TaS2-gs.gpw')



The next step is to calculate the unoccupied bands


kpts = find_high_symmetry_monkhorst_pack('TaS2-gs.gpw', density=5.0)

responseGS = GPAW('TaS2-gs.gpw',
fixdensity=True,
kpts=kpts,
parallel={'band': 1},
nbands=60,
convergence={'bands': 50})

responseGS.get_potential_energy()
responseGS.write('TaS2-gsresponse.gpw', 'all')



Lets compare the result of the tetrahedron method with the point sampling method for broadening of eta=25 meV.


df = DielectricFunction('TaS2-gsresponse.gpw', eta=25e-3, domega0=0.01,
integrationmode='tetrahedron integration')

df1tetra_w, df2tetra_w = df.get_dielectric_function(direction='x')

df = DielectricFunction('TaS2-gsresponse.gpw', eta=25e-3,
domega0=0.01)
df1_w, df2_w = df.get_dielectric_function(direction='x')
omega_w = df.get_frequencies()

if world.rank == 0:
plt.figure(figsize=(6, 6))
plt.plot(omega_w, df2tetra_w.real, label='tetra Re')
plt.plot(omega_w, df2tetra_w.imag, label='tetra Im')
plt.plot(omega_w, df2_w.real, label='Re')
plt.plot(omega_w, df2_w.imag, label='Im')
plt.xlabel('Frequency (eV)')
plt.ylabel('$\\varepsilon$')
plt.xlim(0, 10)
plt.ylim(-20, 20)
plt.legend()
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig('tas2_eps.png', dpi=600)
#    plt.show()


The result of which is shown below. Comparing the methods shows that the calculated dielectric function is much more well behaved when calculated using the tetrahedron method.

Graphene¶

Graphene represents a material which is particularly difficult to converge with respect to the number of k-points. This property originates from its semi-metallic nature and vanishing density of states at the fermi-level which make the calculated properties sensitive to the k-point distribution in the vicinity of the Dirac point. Since the macroscopic dielectric function is not well-defined for two-dimensional systems we will focus on calculating the dielectric function an artificial structure of graphite with double the out-of-plane lattice constant. This should make its properties similar to graphene. It is well known that graphene has a sheet conductance of $$\sigma_s=\frac{e^2}{4\hbar}$$ so, if the individual graphite layers behave as ideal graphene, the optical properties of the structure should be determined by

$\varepsilon = 1 + \frac{4 \pi i}{\omega d} \sigma_s$

where $$d=3.22$$ Å is the thickness of graphene. Below we show the calculated dielectic function (graphene_dielectric_function.py) for a minimum k-point density of 30 Å$$^{-1}$$ corresponding to a kpoint sampling of size (90, 90, 1) and room temperatur broadening eta = 25 meV. It is clear that the properties are well converged for large frequencies using the tetrahedron method. For smaller frequencies the tetrahedron method fares comparably but convergence is tough for frequencies below 0.5 eV where the absorption spectrum goes to zero. This behaviour is due to the partially occupied Dirac point which sensitively effects the integrand of the density response function.

Notes on the implementation of the tetrahedron method¶

The tetrahedron method is still in an experimental phase which means that the user should check the results against the results obtained with point integration. The method is based on the paper of [3] whom provide analytical expressions for the response function integration with interpolated eigenvalues and matrix elements.

In other implementations of the tetrahedron integration method, the division of the BZ into tetrahedras has been performed using a recursive scheme. In our implementation we use the external library scipy.spatial which provide the Delaunay() class to calculate Delaunay triangulated k-point grids from the ground state k-point grid. Delaunay triangulated grids do necessarily give a good division of the Brillouin zone into tetrahedras and particularly for homogeneously spaced k-point grids (such as a Monkhorst Pack) grid many ill-defined tetrahedrons may be created. Such tetrahedrons are however easily filtered away by removing tetrahedrons with very small volumes.

• Suggested performance enhancement: TetrahedronDescriptor(kpts, simplices=None) Factor out the creation of tetrahedras to make it possible to use user-defined tetrahedras. Such an object could inherit from the Delaunay() class.

Additionally, this library provides a k-dimensional tree implementation cKDTree() which is used to efficiently identify k-points in the Brillouin zone. For finite $$\mathbf{q}$$ it is still necessary for the kpoint grid to be uniform. In the optical limit where $$\mathbf{q}=0$$, however, it is possible to use non-uniform k-point grids which can aid a faster convergence, especially for materials such as graphene.

When using the tetrahedron integration method, the plasmafrequency is calculated at $$T=0$$ where the expression reduces an integral over the Fermi surface. The interband transitions are calculated using the temperature of the ground state calculation. The occupation factors are included as modifications to the matrix elements as $$\sqrt{f_n - f_m} \langle \psi_m|\nabla |\psi_n \rangle$$

• Suggested performance enhancement: Take advantage of the analytical dependence of the occupation numbers to treat partially occupied bands more accurately. This is expected to improve the convergence of the optical properties of graphene for low frequencies.

The entirety of the tetrahedron integration code is written in Python except for the calculation of the algebraic expression for the response function integration of a single tetrahedron for which the Python overhead is significant. The algebraic expression are therefore evaluated in C.

Technical details:¶

There are few points about the implementation that we emphasize:

• The code is parallelized over kpoints and occupied bands. The parallelization over occupied bands makes it straight-forward to utilize efficient BLAS libraries to sum un-occupied bands.
• The code employs the Hilbert transform in which the spectral function for the density-density response function is calculated before calculating the the full density response. This speeds up the code significantly for calculations with a lot of frequencies.
• The non-linear frequency grid employed in the calculations is motivated by the fact that when using the Hilbert transform the real part of the dielectric function converges slowly with the upper bound of the frequency grid. Refer to Linear dielectric response of an extended system: theory for the details on the Hilbert transform.

Useful tips¶

Use dry_run option to get an overview of a calculation (especially useful for heavy calculations!):

\$ python3 filename.py --gpaw=df-dry-run=8


Note

But be careful ! LCAO mode calculation results in unreliable unoccupied states above vacuum energy.

It’s important to converge the results with respect to:

nbands,
nkpt (number of kpoints in gs calc.),
eta,
ecut,
ftol,
omegamax (the maximum energy, be careful if hilbert transform is used)
domega0 (the energy spacing, if there is)
vacuum (if there is)


Parameters¶

keyword type default value description
calc str None gpw filename (with ‘all’ option when writing the gpw file)
name str None If specified the chi matrix is saved to chi+qx+qy+qz.pckl where qx, qy, qz is the wave-vector components in reduced coordinates.
frequencies numpy.ndarray None Energies for spectrum. If left unspecified the frequency grid will be non-linear. Ex: numpy.linspace(0,20,201)
domega0 float 0.1 $$\Delta\omega_0$$ for non-linear frequency grid.
omega2 float 10.0 (eV) $$\omega_2$$ for non-linear frequencygrid.
omegamax float Maximum energy eigenvalue difference. Maximum frequency.
ecut float 10 (eV) Planewave energy cutoff. Determines the size of dielectric matrix.
eta float 0.2 (eV) Broadening parameter.
ftol float 1e-6 The threshold for transition: $$f_{ik} - f_{jk} > ftol$$
txt str stdout Output filename.
hilbert bool True Switch for hilbert transform.
nbands int nbands from gs calc Number of bands from gs calc to include.

Details of the DF object¶

class gpaw.response.df.DielectricFunction(calc, response='density', name=None, frequencies=None, domega0=0.1, omega2=10.0, omegamax=None, ecut=50, gammacentered=False, hilbert=True, nbands=None, eta=0.2, ftol=1e-06, threshold=1, intraband=True, nblocks=1, world=<gpaw.mpi.SerialCommunicator object>, txt=<_io.TextIOWrapper name='<stdout>' mode='w' encoding='UTF-8'>, gate_voltage=None, truncation=None, disable_point_group=False, disable_time_reversal=False, integrationmode=None, pbc=None, rate=0.0, omegacutlower=None, omegacutupper=None, eshift=0.0)[source]

This class defines dielectric function related physical quantities.

Creates a DielectricFunction object.

calc: str
The groundstate calculation file that the linear response calculation is based on.
response : str
Type of response function. Currently collinear, scalar options ‘density’, ‘+-‘ and ‘-+’ are implemented. (move to general rf.py)
name: str

If defined, save the response function to:

name + '%+d%+d%+d.pckl' % tuple((q_c * kd.N_c).round())


where q_c is the reduced momentum and N_c is the number of kpoints along each direction.

frequencies: np.ndarray
Specification of frequency grid. If not set the non-linear frequency grid is used.
domega0: float
Frequency grid spacing for non-linear frequency grid at omega = 0.
omega2: float
Frequency at which the non-linear frequency grid has doubled the spacing.
omegamax: float
The upper frequency bound for the non-linear frequency grid.
ecut: float
Plane-wave cut-off.
gammacentered: bool
Center the grid of plane waves around the gamma point or q-vector
hilbert: bool
Use hilbert transform.
nbands: int
Number of bands from calc.
eta: float
ftol: float
Threshold for including close to equally occupied orbitals, f_ik - f_jk > ftol.
threshold: float
Threshold for matrix elements in optical response perturbation theory.
intraband: bool
Include intraband transitions.
world: comm
mpi communicator.
nblocks: int
Split matrices in nblocks blocks and distribute them G-vectors or frequencies over processes.
txt: str
Output file.
gate_voltage: float
Shift Fermi level of ground state calculation by the specified amount.
truncation: str
‘wigner-seitz’ for Wigner Seitz truncated Coulomb. ‘2D, 1D or 0d for standard analytical truncation schemes. Non-periodic directions are determined from k-point grid
eshift: float
Shift unoccupied bands
get_dielectric_function(xc='RPA', q_c=[0, 0, 0], q_v=None, direction='x', filename='df.csv')[source]

Calculate the dielectric function.

Returns dielectric function without and with local field correction: df_NLFC_w, df_LFC_w = DielectricFunction.get_dielectric_function()

get_eels_spectrum(xc='RPA', q_c=[0, 0, 0], direction='x', filename='eels.csv')[source]

Calculate EELS spectrum. By default, generate a file ‘eels.csv’.

EELS spectrum is obtained from the imaginary part of the density response function as, EELS(omega) = - 4 * pi / q^2 Im chi. Returns EELS spectrum without and with local field corrections:

df_NLFC_w, df_LFC_w = DielectricFunction.get_eels_spectrum()

get_macroscopic_dielectric_constant(xc='RPA', direction='x', q_v=None)[source]

Calculate macroscopic dielectric constant.

Returns eM_NLFC and eM_LFC.

Macroscopic dielectric constant is defined as the real part of dielectric function at w=0.

Parameters:

eM_LFC: float
Dielectric constant without local field correction. (RPA, ALDA)
eM2_NLFC: float
Dielectric constant with local field correction.
get_polarizability(xc='RPA', direction='x', q_c=[0, 0, 0], filename='polarizability.csv', pbc=None)[source]

Calculate the polarizability alpha. In 3D the imaginary part of the polarizability is related to the dielectric function by Im(eps_M) = 4 pi * Im(alpha). In systems with reduced dimensionality the converged value of alpha is independent of the cell volume. This is not the case for eps_M, which is ill defined. A truncated Coulomb kernel will always give eps_M = 1.0, whereas the polarizability maintains its structure.

By default, generate a file ‘polarizability.csv’. The five colomns are: frequency (eV), Real(alpha0), Imag(alpha0), Real(alpha), Imag(alpha) alpha0 is the result without local field effects and the dimension of alpha is AA to the power of non-periodic directions

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 [3] 1. MacDonald, A. H., Vosko, S. H. & Coleridge, P. T., Extensions of the tetrahedron method for evaluating spectral properties of solids. J. Phys. C Solid State Phys. 12, 2991–3002 (1979).