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 Γ
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