UC Berkeley

We present first-principles calculations on the vertical ionization potentials (IPs), electron affinities (EAs), and singlet excitation energies on an aromatic-molecule test set (benzene, thiophene, 1,2,5-thiadiazole, naphthalene, benzothiazole, and tetrathiafulvalene) within the GW and Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) formalisms. Our computational framework, which employs a real-space basis for ground-state and a transition-space basis for excited-state calculations, is well suited for high-accuracy calculations on molecules, as we show by comparing against G0W0 calculations within a plane-wave-basis formalism. We then generalize our framework to test variants of the GW approximation that include a local density approximation (LDA)-derived vertex function (ΓLDA) and quasiparticle-self-consistent (QS) iterations. We find that ΓLDA and quasiparticle self-consistency shift IPs and EAs by roughly the same magnitude, but with opposite sign for IPs and the same sign for EAs. G0W0 and QSGWΓLDA are more accurate for IPs, while G0W0ΓLDA and QSGW are best for EAs. For optical excitations, we find that perturbative GW-BSE underestimates the singlet excitation energy, while self-consistent GW-BSE results in good agreement with previous best-estimate values for both valence and Rydberg excitations. Finally, our work suggests that a hybrid approach, in which G0W0 energies are used for occupied orbitals and G0W0ΓLDA for unoccupied orbitals, also yields optical excitation energies in good agreement with experiment but at a smaller computational cost.