Dispersion interactions from a local polarizability model

A local approximation for dynamic polarizability leads to a nonlocal functional for the long-range dispersion interaction energy via an imaginary-frequency integral. We analyze several local polarizability approximations and argue that the form underlying the construction of our recent van der Waals...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vydrov, Oleg A., Van Voorhis, Troy
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2011
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/60863
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7111-0176
Description
Summary:A local approximation for dynamic polarizability leads to a nonlocal functional for the long-range dispersion interaction energy via an imaginary-frequency integral. We analyze several local polarizability approximations and argue that the form underlying the construction of our recent van der Waals functional [O. A. Vydrov and T. Van Voorhis, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 063004 (2009)] is particularly well physically justified. Using this improved formula, we compute dynamic dipole polarizabilities and van der Waals C6 coefficients for a set of atoms and molecules. Good agreement with the benchmark values is obtained in most cases.