UC Berkeley

Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KSDFT) is by far the most widely used electronic structure theory in condensed matter systems. Density functional perturbation theory (DFPT) studies the response of a quantum system under small perturbation, where the quantum system is described at the level of first principle electronic structure theories like KSDFT. One important application of DFPT is the calculation of vibration properties such as phonons, which can be further used to calculate many physical properties such as infrared spectroscopy, elastic neutron scattering, specific heat, heat conduction, and electron-phonon interaction related behaviors such as superconductivity . DFPT describes vibration proper- ties through a polarizability operator, which characterizes the linear response of the electron density with respect to the perturbation of the external potential. More specifically, in vibration calculations, the polarizability operator needs to be applied to d × NA ∼ O(Ne) perturbation vectors, where d is the spatial dimension (usually d = 3), NA is the number of atoms, and Ne is the number of electrons. In general the complexity for solving KSDFT is O(Ne3), while the complexity for solving DFPT is O(Ne4). It is possible to reduce the computational complexity of DFPT calculations by “linear scaling methods”. Such methods can be successful in reducing the computational cost for systems of large sizes with substantial band gaps, but this can be challenging for medium-sized systems with relatively small band gaps.

In the discussion below, we will slightly abuse the term “phonon calculation” to refer to calculation of vibration properties of condensed matter systems as well as isolated molecules. In order to apply the polarizability operator to O(Ne) vectors, we need to solve O(Ne2) coupled Sternheimer equations. On the other hand, when a constant number of degrees of freedom per electron is used, the size of the Hamiltonian matrix is only O(Ne). Hence asymptotically there is room to obtain a set of only O(Ne) “compressed perturbation vectors”, which encodes essentially all the information of the O(Ne2) Sternheimer equations. In this dissertation, we develop a new method called adaptively compressed polarizability operator (ACP) formulation, which successfully reduces the computational complexity of phonon

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calculations to O(Ne3) for the first time. The ACP formulation does not rely on exponential decay properties of the density matrix as in linear scaling methods, and its accuracy depends weakly on the size of the band gap. Hence the method can be used for phonon calculations of both insulators and semiconductors with small gaps.

There are three key ingredients of the ACP formulation. 1) The Sternheimer equations are equations for shifted Hamiltonians, where each shift corresponds to an energy level of an occupied band. Hence for a general right hand side vector, there are Ne possible energies (shifts). We use a Chebyshev interpolation procedure to disentangle such energy dependence so that there are only constant number of shifts that is independent of Ne. 2) We disentangle the O(Ne2) right hand side vectors using the recently developed interpolative separable density fitting procedure, to compress the right-hand-side vectors. 3) We construct the polarizability by adaptive compression so that the operator remains low rank as well as accurate when applying to a certain set of vectors. This make it possible for fast computation of the matrix inversion using methods like Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury.

In particular, the new method does not employ the “nearsightedness” property of electrons for insulating systems with substantial band gaps as in linear scaling methods. Hence our method can be applied to insulators as well as semiconductors with small band gaps.

This dissertation also extend the method to deal with nonlocal pseudopotentials as well as systems in finite temperature. Combining all these components together, we obtain an accurate, efficient method to compute the vibrational properties for insulating and metallic systems.