Insight and Progress in Density Functional Theory

Density functional theory of electronic structure is widely and successfully applied in simulations throughout engineering and sciences. However, there are spectacular failures for many predicted properties. The errors include underestimation of the barriers of chemical reactions, the band gaps of materials, the energies of dissociating molecular ions and charge transfer excitation energies. Typical DFT calculations also fail to describe degenerate or near degenerate systems, as arise in the breaking of chemical bonds, and strongly correlated materials. These errors can all be characterized and understood through the perspective of fractional charges and fractional spins introduced recently. Standard approximations for the exchange-correlation functional have been found to give big errors for the linearity condition of fractional charges, leading to delocalization error, and the constancy condition of fractional spins, leading to static correlation error. These two conditions have been unified and extended to states with both fractional charge and fractional spin to give a much more stringent condition: the exact energy functional is a plane, linear along the fractional charge coordinate and constant along the fractional spin coordinate with a line of discontinuity at the integer. Violation of this condition underlies the failure of known approximate functionals to describe the gaps in strongly correlated systems. It is shown that explicitly discontinuous functionals of the density or orbitals that go beyond these currently used smooth approximations is the key for the application of density functional theory to strongly correlated systems. Understanding the errors of functionals in the simplest way possible --- as violations of exact conditions for fractional charges and fractional spins -- opens the path forward for reduction of the errors and for applications of density functional theory in new frontiers.