QM/MM methods for crystalline defects. Part 1: Locality of the tight binding model

The tight binding model is a minimal electronic structure model for molecular modelling and simulation. We show that the total energy in this model can be decomposed into site energies, that is, into contributions from each atomic site whose influence on their environment decays exponentially. This result lays the foundation for a rigorous analysis of QM/MM coupling schemes.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figure

Numerical methods for a Kohn-Sham density functional model based on optimal transport

In this paper, we study numerical discretizations to solve density functional models in the "strictly correlated electrons" (SCE) framework. Unlike previous studies our work is not restricted to radially symmetric densities. In the SCE framework, the exchange-correlation functional encodes the effects of the strong correlation regime by minimizing the pairwise Coulomb repulsion, resulting in an optimal transport problem. We give a mathematical derivation of the self-consistent Kohn-Sham-SCE equations, construct an efficient numerical discretization for this type of problem for N = 2 electrons, and apply it to the H2 molecule in its dissociating limit. Moreover, we prove that the SCE density functional model is correct for the H2 molecule in its dissociating limit.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figure

Geometry Equilibration of Crystalline Defects in Quantum and Atomistic Descriptions

We develop a rigorous framework for modelling the geometry equilibration of crystalline defects. We formulate the equilibration of crystal defects as a variational problems on a discrete energy space and establish qualitatively sharp far-field decay estimates for the equilibrium configuration. This work extends Ehrlacher, Ortner, Shapeev (2016) by admitting infinite-range interaction which in particular includes some quantum chemistry based interatomic potentials.Comment: 71 pages, 4 figure

QM/MM methods for crystalline defects. Part 2 : Consistent energy and force-mixing

We develop and analyze QM/MM (quantum/classic) hybrid methods for crystalline defects within the context of the tight-binding model. QM/MM methods employ accurate quantum mechanics (QM) models only in regions of interest (defects) and switch to computationally cheaper interatomic potential molecular mechanics (MM) models to describe the crystalline bulk. We propose new energy-based and force-based QM/MM methods, building on two principles: (i) locality of the QM model; and (ii) constructing the MM model as an explicit and controllable approximation of the QM model. This approach enables us to rigorously establish convergence rates in terms of the size of the QM region