Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 8: Electronic-Structure Theory: New Concepts and Developments in Density Functional Theory and Beyond - I (joint session DS, HL, MA, MM, O, TT, organized by O)

TT 8.1: Talk

Monday, March 20, 2017, 10:30–10:45, GER 38

DFT wants U: Embedded-cluster calculations of surface oxygen vacancies at TiO₂ with Hubbard-corrected DFT — •Matthias Kick, Karsten Reuter, and Harald Oberhofer — Technische Universität München

Surface oxygen vacancies, in particular their nature as charge trapping centers, play an inportant role for many oxide materials properties. However, addressing them with first-principles density-functional theory (DFT) computations remains a challenge. At least Hubbard corrected DFT+U is required to achieve an appropriate electron localization. At the same time, the large dielectric constant of polarizable oxides like TiO₂ leads to a strong polarization response. As a result supercells of increasing size are necessary in order to avoid spurious interactions between periodic images in case of charged defects, rendering the conventional periodic boundary condition supercell approach impractical.

Full DFT+U functionality has been implemented in the all-electron electronic structure code FHI-aims. Combined with the solid state (QM/MM) embedding functionality in FHI-aims, this yields a numerically most efficient approach to treat aperiodic aspects at oxide surfaces. We illustrate this by calculating neutral and charged states of the surface oxygen vacancy at rutile TiO₂ (110). We systematically assess the reliability and computational efficiency by comparing to hybrid-level DFT calculations and calculations performed in conventional supercells.