Orbital currents in the Colle-Salvetti correlation energy functional and the degeneracy problem

Abstract

Popular density functionals for the exchange-correlation energy typically fail to reproduce the degeneracy of different ground states of open-shell atoms. As a remedy, functionals which explicitly depend on the current density have been suggested. We present an analysis of this problem by investigating functionals that explicitly depend on the Kohn-Sham orbitals. Going beyond the exact-exchange approximation by adding correlation in the form of the Colle-Salvetti functional we show how current-dependent terms enter the Colle-Salvetti expression and their relevance is evaluated. A very good description of the degeneracy of ground-states for atoms of the first and second row of the periodic table is obtained.