Electronic levels and electrical response of periodic molecular structures from plane-wave orbital-dependent calculations

Plane-wave electronic-structure predictions based upon orbital-dependent density-functional theory (OD-DFT) approximations, such as hybrid density-functional methods and self-interaction density-functional corrections, are severely affected by computational inaccuracies in evaluating electron interactions in the plane-wave representation. These errors arise from divergence singularities in the plane-wave summation of electrostatic and exchange interaction contributions. Auxiliary-function corrections are reciprocal-space countercharge corrections that cancel plane-wave singularities through the addition of an auxiliary function to the point-charge electrostatic kernel that enters into the expression of interaction terms. At variance with real-space countercharge corrections that are employed in the context of density-functional theory (DFT), reciprocal-space corrections are computationally inexpensive, making them suited to more demanding OD-DFT calculations. Nevertheless, there exists much freedom in the choice of auxiliary functions and various definitions result in different levels of performance in eliminating plane-wave inaccuracies. In this work, we derive exact point-charge auxiliary functions for the description of molecular structures of arbitrary translational symmetry, including the yet unaddressed one-dimensional case. In addition, we provide a critical assessment of different reciprocal-space countercharge corrections and demonstrate the improved accuracy of point-charge auxiliary functions in predicting the electronic levels and electrical response of conjugated polymers from plane-wave OD-DFT calculations.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Voltage effects on the stability of Pd ensembles in Pd-Au/Au(111) surface alloys

The catalytic performance of multimetallic electrodes is often attributed to a beneficial combination of ligand, strain, and ensemble effects. Understanding the influence of the electrochemical environment on the stability of the alloy surface structure is thus a crucial component to the design of highly active and durable electrocatalysts. In this work, we study the effects of an applied voltage to electrocatalytic Pd-Au/Au(111) surface alloys in contact with a model continuum electrolyte. Using planewave density functional theory, two-dimensional cluster expansions are parameterized and used to simulate dilute Pd-Au surface alloys under electrochemical conditions via Metropolis Monte Carlo within an extended canonical ensemble. While Pd monomers are stable at all potentials considered, different extents of surface electrification are observed to promote the formation of Pd dimers and trimers, as well as clusters of Pd monomers. We find that the relative proportion of monomer, dimer, and trimer surface fractions is in good agreement with in situ scanning tunneling microscopy measurements. The further development and refinement of the approaches described herein may serve as a useful aid in the development of next-generation electrocatalysts.Comment: 21 pages and 11 figure

Revised self-consistent continuum solvation in electronic-structure calculations

The solvation model proposed by Fattebert and Gygi [Journal of Computational Chemistry 23, 662 (2002)] and Scherlis et al. [Journal of Chemical Physics 124, 074103 (2006)] is reformulated, overcoming some of the numerical limitations encountered and extending its range of applicability. We first recast the problem in terms of induced polarization charges that act as a direct mapping of the self-consistent continuum dielectric; this allows to define a functional form for the dielectric that is well behaved both in the high-density region of the nuclear charges and in the low-density region where the electronic wavefunctions decay into the solvent. Second, we outline an iterative procedure to solve the Poisson equation for the quantum fragment embedded in the solvent that does not require multi-grid algorithms, is trivially parallel, and can be applied to any Bravais crystallographic system. Last, we capture some of the non-electrostatic or cavitation terms via a combined use of the quantum volume and quantum surface [Physical Review Letters 94, 145501 (2005)] of the solute. The resulting self-consistent continuum solvation (SCCS) model provides a very effective and compact fit of computational and experimental data, whereby the static dielectric constant of the solvent and one parameter allow to fit the electrostatic energy provided by the PCM model with a mean absolute error of 0.3 kcal/mol on a set of 240 neutral solutes. Two parameters allow to fit experimental solvation energies on the same set with a mean absolute error of 1.3 kcal/mol. A detailed analysis of these results, broken down along different classes of chemical compounds, shows that several classes of organic compounds display very high accuracy, with solvation energies in error of 0.3-0.4 kcal/mol, whereby larger discrepancies are mostly limited to self-dissociating species and strong hydrogen-bond forming compounds.Comment: The following article has been accepted by The Journal of Chemical Physics. After it is published, it will be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?jcp

Gambia continues to defy existing political norms on the African continent

Ismaila Ceesay analyses the surprise defeat of President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia by Adama Barrow in the recent elections

Off farm employment among paddy farmers in the Muda and Kemasin Semarak granary areas, Malaysia

Poverty is one of the most serious problems confronting paddy farmers worldwide, Malaysia inclusive. Off farm employment is an alternative strategy and has a potential to improve the income and well being of the paddy farmers. This study assessed the off farm employment decision among 500 paddy farmers in Muda Agricultural Development Authority and Kemasin Semerak granary areas. Specifically the study determined the relationship between the determinants of off farm and the off farm participation decision. It also describes the characteristics of respondents and their status in off farm employment. And it also tests hypotheses of relationships between off farm and individual, family and farm characteristics. Furthermore, it examined the income level of the farm households from paddy farming and off-farm employments and shows the effect of off farm employment to paddy farmers, using descriptive analysis, chi- square () analysis and logit regression methods. Cross tabulation were applied to identify the relationship between dependent variable (off farm employment) and independent variables (age, gender, education, dependents size, other income, farm size and type). Chi-square was used to test the null hypothesis, stating that “there is no relationship between off farm employment and individual, family and farm characteristics respectively”. To know the strength of the relationship between the variables that shows statistical significance with the dependant variable, Logit regression model was used. From the overall empirical analysis of the results, the variables that show highly statistically significant association with off farm employment are age of farmers, gender number of dependants other income and farm type. Evidently farm size and education were not significant factors affecting off farm participation decision as no significant association was observed between them and off farm participation

Koopmans-compliant functionals and their performance against reference molecular data

Koopmans-compliant functionals emerge naturally from extending the constraint of piecewise linearity of the total energy as a function of the number of electrons to each fractional orbital occupation. When applied to approximate density-functional theory, these corrections give rise to orbital-density-dependent functionals and potentials. We show that the simplest implementations of Koopmans' compliance provide accurate estimates for the quasiparticle excitations and leave the total energy functional almost or exactly intact, i.e., they describe correctly electron removals or additions, but do not necessarily alter the electronic charge density distribution within the system. Additional functionals can then be constructed that modify the potential energy surface, including e.g. Perdew-Zunger corrections. These functionals become exactly one-electron self-interaction free and, as all Koopmans-compliant functionals, are approximately many-electron self-interaction free. We discuss in detail these different formulations, and provide extensive benchmarks for the 55 molecules in the reference G2-1 set, using Koopmans-compliant functionals constructed from local-density or generalized-gradient approximations. In all cases we find excellent performance in the electronic properties, comparable or improved with respect to that of many-body perturbation theories, such as G$_0$W$_0$ and self-consistent GW, at a fraction of the cost and in a variational framework that also delivers energy derivatives. Structural properties and atomization energies preserve or slightly improve the accuracy of the underlying density-functional approximations (Note: Supplemental Material is included in the source)