First-principles Hubbard and Hund's corrected approximate density functional theory predicts an accurate fundamental gap in rutile and anatase

    Okan K. Orhan and David D. O'Regan*

    • School of Physics, AMBER, and CRANN Institute, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin, Ireland

    • *Corresponding author: david.o.regan@tcd.ie

    Phys. Rev. B 101, 245137 – Published 12 June, 2020

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.101.245137

    Abstract

    Titanium dioxide () presents a long-standing challenge for approximate Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KS-DFT), as well as to its Hubbard-corrected extension, . We find that a previously proposed extension of first-principles to incorporate a Hund's correction, termed , in combination with parameters calculated using a recently proposed linear-response theory, predicts fundamental band gaps that are accurate to well within the experimental uncertainty in rutile and anatase . Our approach builds upon established findings that Hubbard correction of both the titanium and oxygen subspaces in , symbolically giving , is necessary to achieve acceptable band gaps using . This requirement remains when the first-principles Hund's is included. We also find that the calculated gap depends on the correlated subspace definition even when using subspace-specific first-principles and parameters. Using the simplest reasonable correlated subspace definition and underlying functional, the local density approximation, we show that high accuracy results from using a relatively uncomplicated form of the functional. For closed-shell systems such as , we describe how various functionals reduce to with suitably modified parameters, so that reliable band gaps can be calculated for rutile and anatase with no modifications to a conventional code.

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