Density Functional Theory for Buckyballs within Symmetrized Icosahedral Basis

We have developed a highly efficient computation method based on density functional theory (DFT) within a set of fully symmetrized basis functions for the C₆₀ buckyball, which possesses the icosahedral (Ih) point-group symmetry with 120 symmetry operations. We demonstrate that our approach is much more efficient than the conventional approach based on three-dimensional plane waves. When applied to the calculation of optical transitions, our method is more than one order of magnitude faster than the existing DFT package with a conventional plane-wave basis. This makes it very convenient for modeling optical and transport properties of quantum devices related to buckyball crystals. The method introduced here can be easily extended to other fullerene-like materials.