Deformation Potentials: Towards a Systematic Way beyond the Atomic Fragment Approach in Orbital-Free Density...

This work presents a method to move beyond the recently introduced atomic fragment approximation. Like the bare atomic fragment approach, the new method is an ab initio, parameter-free, orbital-free implementation of density functional theory based on the bifunctional formalism that treats the potential and the electron density as two separate variables, and provides access to the Kohn-Sham Pauli kinetic energy for an appropriately chosen Pauli potential. In the present ansatz, the molecular Pauli potential is approximated by the sum of the bare atomic fragment approach, and a so-called deformation potential that takes the interaction between the atoms into account. It is shown that this model can reproduce the bond-length contraction due to multiple bonding within the list of second-row homonuclear dimers. The present model only relies on the electron densities of the participating atoms, which themselves are represented by a simple monopole expansion. Thus, the bond-length contraction can be rationalized without referring to the angular quantum numbers of the participating atoms.