Accurate and efficient localized basis sets for two-dimensional materials

Daniel Bennett; Michele Pizzochero; Javier Junquera; Efthimios Kaxiras

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arXiv · 2411.12566

Accurate and efficient localized basis sets for two-dimensional materials

Daniel Bennett·Michele Pizzochero·Javier Junquera·Efthimios Kaxiras

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Abstract

First-principles density functional theory (DFT) codes which employ a localized basis offer advantages over those which use plane-wave bases, such as better scaling with system size and better suitability to low-dimensional systems. The trade-off is that care must be taken in order to generate a good localized basis set which is efficient and accurate in a variety of environments. Here we develop and make freely available optimized local basis sets for two common two-dimensional (2D) materials, graphene and hexagonal boron nitride, for the \siesta DFT code. Each basis set is benchmarked against the \abinit plane-wave code, using the same pseudopotentials and exchange-correlation functionals. We find that a significant improvement is obtained by including the $l+2$ polarization orbitals ($4f$) to the basis set, which greatly improves angular flexibility. The optimized basis sets yield much better agreement with plane-wave calculations for key features of the physical system, including total energy, lattice constant and cohesive energy. The optimized basis sets also result in a speedup of the calculations with respect to the non-optimized, native choices.

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Daniel Bennett, Michele Pizzochero, Javier Junquera, Efthimios Kaxiras. 2024-11-22. Accurate and efficient localized basis sets for two-dimensional materials. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12566

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