Juerg Hutter

Isobaric−Isothermal Molecular Dynamics Simulations Utilizing Density Functional Theory: An Assessment of the Structure and Density of Water at Near-Ambient Conditions

We present herein a comprehensive density functional theory study toward assessing the accuracy of two popular gradient-corrected exchange correlation functionals on the structure and density of liquid water at near ambient conditions in the isobaric-isothermal ensemble. Our results indicate that both PBE and BLYP functionals under predict the density and over structure the liquid. Adding the dispersion correction due to Grimme (1, 2) improves the predicted densities for both BLYP and PBE in a significant manner. Moreover, the addition of the dispersion correction for BLYP yields an oxygen-oxygen radial distribution function in excellent agreement with experiment. Thus, we conclude that one can obtain a very satisfactory model for water using BLYP and a correction for dispersion.

Real-World Predictions from Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Simulations

In this review we present the techniques of ab initio molecular dynamics simulation improved to its current stage where the analysis of existing processes and the prediction of further chemical features and real-world processes are feasible. For this reason we describe the relevant developments in ab initio molecular dynamics leading to this stage. Among them, parallel implementations, different basis set functions, density functionals, and van der Waals corrections are reported. The chemical features accessible through AIMD are discussed. These are IR, NMR, as well as EXAFS spectra, sampling methods like metadynamics and others, Wannier functions, dipole moments of molecules in condensed phase, and many other properties. Electrochemical reactions investigated by ab initio molecular dynamics methods in solution, on surfaces as well as complex interfaces, are also presented.

Direct energy functional minimization under orthogonality constraints

The direct energy functional minimization problem in electronic structure theory, where the single-particle orbitals are optimized under the constraint of orthogonality, is explored. We present an orbital transformation based on an efficient expansion of the inverse factorization of the overlap matrix that keeps orbitals orthonormal. The orbital transformation maps the orthogonality constrained energy functional to an approximate unconstrained functional, which is correct to some order in a neighborhood of an orthogonal but approximate solution. A conjugate gradient scheme can then be used to find the ground state orbitals from the minimization of a sequence of transformed unconstrained electronic energy functionals. The technique provides an efficient, robust, and numerically stable approach to direct total energy minimization in first principles electronic structure theory based on tight-binding, Hartree-Fock, or density functional theory. For sparse problems, where both the orbitals and the effective single-particle Hamiltonians have sparse matrix representations, the effort scales linearly with the number of basis functions N in each iteration. For problems where only the overlap and Hamiltonian matrices are sparse the computational cost scales as O(M2N), where M is the number of occupied orbitals. We report a single point density functional energy calculation of a DNA decamer hydrated with 4003 water molecules under periodic boundary conditions. The DNA fragment containing a cis-syn thymine dimer is composed of 634 atoms and the whole system contains a total of 12,661 atoms and 103,333 spherical Gaussian basis functions.

Large-Scale Computation of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Shifts for Paramagnetic Solids Using CP2K

Large-scale computations of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) shifts for extended paramagnetic solids (pNMR) are reported using the highly efficient Gaussian-augmented plane-wave implementation of the CP2K code. Combining hyperfine couplings obtained with hybrid functionals with g-tensors and orbital shieldings computed using gradient-corrected functionals, contact, pseudocontact, and orbital-shift contributions to pNMR shifts are accessible. Due to the efficient and highly parallel performance of CP2K, a wide variety of materials with large unit cells can be studied with extended Gaussian basis sets. Validation of various approaches for the different contributions to pNMR shifts is done first for molecules in a large supercell in comparison with typical quantum-chemical codes. This is then extended to a detailed study of g-tensors for extended solid transition-metal fluorides and for a series of complex lithium vanadium phosphates. Finally, lithium pNMR shifts are computed for Li3V2(PO4)3, for which detailed experimental data are available. This has allowed an in-depth study of different approaches (e.g., full periodic versus incremental cluster computations of g-tensors and different functionals and basis sets for hyperfine computations) as well as a thorough analysis of the different contributions to the pNMR shifts. This study paves the way for a more-widespread computational treatment of NMR shifts for paramagnetic materials.