Electronic structure interpolation via atomic orbitals

We present an efficient scheme for accurate electronic structure interpolation based on systematically improvable optimized atomic orbitals. The atomic orbitals are generated by minimizing the spillage value between the atomic basis calculations and the converged plane wave basis calculations on some coarse k-point grid. They are then used to calculate the band structure of the full Brillouin zone using the linear combination of atomic orbitals algorithms. We find that usually 16-25 orbitals per atom can give an accuracy of about 10 meV compared to the full ab initio calculations, and the accuracy can be systematically improved by using more atomic orbitals. The scheme is easy to implement and robust, and works equally well for metallic systems and systems with complicated band structures. Furthermore, the atomic orbitals have much better transferability than Shirley's basis and Wannier functions, which is very useful for perturbation calculations.