SCDM-k: Localized orbitals for solids via selected columns of the density matrix

The recently developed selected columns of the density matrix (SCDM) method [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 11, 1463, 2015] is a simple, robust, efficient and highly parallelizable method for constructing localized orbitals from a set of delocalized Kohn-Sham orbitals for insulators and semiconductors with $\Gamma$ point sampling of the Brillouin zone. In this work we generalize the SCDM method to Kohn-Sham density functional theory calculations with k-point sampling of the Brillouin zone, which is needed for more general electronic structure calculations for solids. We demonstrate that our new method, called SCDM-k, is by construction gauge independent and is a natural way to describe localized orbitals. SCDM-k computes localized orbitals without the use of an optimization procedure, and thus does not suffer from the possibility of being trapped in a local minimum. Furthermore, the computational complexity of using SCDM-k to construct orthogonal and localized orbitals scales as O(N log N ) where N is the total number of k-points in the Brillouin zone. SCDM-k is therefore efficient even when a large number of k-points are used for Brillouin zone sampling. We demonstrate the numerical performance of SCDM-k using systems with model potentials in two and three dimensions.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures; added more background sections, clarified presentation of the algorithm, revised the presentation of previous work, added a more high level overview of the new algorithm, and mildly clarified the presentation of the results (there were no changes to the numerical results themselves

Compressed representation of Kohn-Sham orbitals via selected columns of the density matrix

Given a set of Kohn-Sham orbitals from an insulating system, we present a simple, robust, efficient and highly parallelizable method to construct a set of, optionally orthogonal, localized basis functions for the associated subspace. Our method explicitly uses the fact that density matrices associated with insulating systems decay exponentially along the off-diagonal direction in the real space representation. Our method avoids the usage of an optimization procedure, and the localized basis functions are constructed directly from a set of selected columns of the density matrix (SCDM). Consequently, the only adjustable parameter in our method is the truncation threshold of the localized basis functions. Our method can be used in any electronic structure software package with an arbitrary basis set. We demonstrate the numerical accuracy and parallel scalability of the SCDM procedure using orbitals generated by the Quantum ESPRESSO software package. We also demonstrate a procedure for combining SCDM with Hockney's algorithm to efficiently perform Hartree-Fock exchange energy calculations with near linear scaling.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; short example code for computing the SCDM; parallel scaling results; slightly restructured introduction and clarification of the input needed to compute the SCD