Computing photoionization spectra in Gaussian basis sets

Abstract

We present a method to compute the photoionization spectra of atoms and molecules in linear response time-dependent density functional theory. The electronic orbital variations corresponding to ionized electrons are expanded on a basis set of delocalized functions obtained as the solution of the inhomogeneous Helmholtz equation with gaussian basis set functions as right-hand side. The resulting scheme is able to reproduce photoionization spectra without any need for artificial regularization or localization. We demonstrate that it is able to produce accurate spectra for semilocal exchange-correlation functionals even using relatively small standard gaussian basis sets.