Excited States from Restricted Open Shell Plane-Wave DFT

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Main Authors: Sahre, Michael J., Romanelli, Marco, Marsman, Martijn, González, Leticia, Kresse, Georg
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sahre, Michael J.
Romanelli, Marco
Marsman, Martijn
González, Leticia
Kresse, Georg
author_facet Sahre, Michael J.
Romanelli, Marco
Marsman, Martijn
González, Leticia
Kresse, Georg
contents Variational excited-state density functional theory (DFT) enables the calculation of excited states at a cost comparable to ground-state calculations, but single-configuration approaches often suffer from spin contamination. We implement restricted open-shell Kohn-Sham (ROKS) DFT, which recovers spin-pure singlet excitation energies via the variational minimization of a weighted combination of mixed-spin and triplet configurations, within the plane-wave projector augmented-wave framework of VASP. The energy functional is optimized using a preconditioned conjugate-gradient or a direct inversion in the iterative subspace algorithm, and analytical atomic forces are derived. The implementation is validated for eight organic molecules by comparison to the Q-Chem quantum chemistry code, yielding mean deviations of approximately $30$ eV. As a solid-state application, we investigate the three lowest lying excitations of MgO with a neutral oxygen vacancy. For a dielectric-dependent hybrid functional, vertical excitation energies from ROKS and time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) differ on average by about $0.21$ eV. The Franck-Condon shifts deviate on average by $0.14$ eV between the two methods and mass-weighted displacements between the excited states and the ground state by $0.12$ amu$^{1/2}$ Ang. Additional calculations at the PBE level reveal that these properties depend less strongly on the DFT functional for ROKS than for TDDFT. These results demonstrate that ROKS provides excitation energies and excited-state forces with an accuracy similar to TDDFT while retaining the favorable scaling of ground-state DFT, making it a promising approach for affordable excited-state simulations in extended systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_28637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Excited States from Restricted Open Shell Plane-Wave DFT
Sahre, Michael J.
Romanelli, Marco
Marsman, Martijn
González, Leticia
Kresse, Georg
Chemical Physics
Variational excited-state density functional theory (DFT) enables the calculation of excited states at a cost comparable to ground-state calculations, but single-configuration approaches often suffer from spin contamination. We implement restricted open-shell Kohn-Sham (ROKS) DFT, which recovers spin-pure singlet excitation energies via the variational minimization of a weighted combination of mixed-spin and triplet configurations, within the plane-wave projector augmented-wave framework of VASP. The energy functional is optimized using a preconditioned conjugate-gradient or a direct inversion in the iterative subspace algorithm, and analytical atomic forces are derived. The implementation is validated for eight organic molecules by comparison to the Q-Chem quantum chemistry code, yielding mean deviations of approximately $30$ eV. As a solid-state application, we investigate the three lowest lying excitations of MgO with a neutral oxygen vacancy. For a dielectric-dependent hybrid functional, vertical excitation energies from ROKS and time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) differ on average by about $0.21$ eV. The Franck-Condon shifts deviate on average by $0.14$ eV between the two methods and mass-weighted displacements between the excited states and the ground state by $0.12$ amu$^{1/2}$ Ang. Additional calculations at the PBE level reveal that these properties depend less strongly on the DFT functional for ROKS than for TDDFT. These results demonstrate that ROKS provides excitation energies and excited-state forces with an accuracy similar to TDDFT while retaining the favorable scaling of ground-state DFT, making it a promising approach for affordable excited-state simulations in extended systems.
title Excited States from Restricted Open Shell Plane-Wave DFT
topic Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28637