2018/02/28 by S. Vuckovic, P. Gori-Giorgi, F. Della Sala +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #physics.chem-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.8b01054
6 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2018/05/24 · arxiv updated 2018/05/25
Approximate exchange-correlation functionals built by modeling in a non-linear way the adiabatic connection (AC) integrand of density functional theory have many attractive features, being virtually parameters-free and satisfying different exact properties, but they also have a fundamental flaw: they violate the size-consistency condition, crucial to evaluate interaction energies of molecular systems. We show that size consistency in the AC-based functionals can be restored in a very simple way at no extra computational cost. Results on a large set of benchmark molecular interaction energies show that functionals based on the interaction strength interpolation approximations are significantly more accurate than the second-order perturbation theory.