An efficient first-principle approach for electronic structures calculations of nanomaterials

An efficient parallel implementation has been realized for a recently proposed central insertion scheme (Jiang, Liu, Lu, Luo. J Chem Phys 2006,124,214711; J Chem Phys 2006,125, 149902) that allows to calculate electronic structures of nanomaterials at various density functional theory levels. It has adopted the sparse-matrix format for Fock/Kohn-Sham and overlap matrices, as well as a combination of implicitly restarted Arnoldi methods (IRAM) and spectral transformation for computing selected eigenvalues/eigenvectors. A systematic error analysis and control for the proposed method has been provided based on a strict mathematical basis. The efficiency and applicability of the new implementation have been demonstrated by calculations of electronic structures of two different nanomaterials consisting of one hundred thousand electrons.