Hybrid functional pseudopotentials

Abstract

The consistency between the exchange-correlation functional used in pseudopotential construction and in the actual density functional theory calculation is essential for the accurate prediction of fundamental properties of materials. However, routine hybrid density functional calculations at present still rely on generalized gradient approximation pseudopotentials due to the lack of hybrid functional pseudopotentials. Here, we present a scheme for generating hybrid functional pseudopotentials, and we analyze the importance of pseudopotential density functional consistency for hybrid functionals. For the PBE0 hybrid functional, we benchmark our pseudopotentials for structural parameters and fundamental electronic gaps of the Gaussian-2 (G2) molecular dataset and some simple solids. Our results demonstrate that using our PBE0 pseudopotentials in PBE0 calculations improves agreement with respect to all-electron calculations.