Time-dependent current density functional theory for the linear response of weakly disordered systems

Abstract

This paper develops a quantitatively accurate first-principles description for the frequency and the linewidth of collective electronic excitations in inhomogeneous weakly disordered systems. A finite linewidth in general has intrinsic and extrinsic sources. At low temperatures and outside the region where electron-phonon interaction occurs, the only intrinsic damping mechanism is provided by electron-electron interaction. This kind of intrinsic damping can be described within time-dependent density-functional theory (TDFT), but one needs to go beyond the adiabatic approximation and include retardation effects. It was shown previously that a density-functional response theory that is local in space but nonlocal in time has to be constructed in terms of the currents, rather than the density. This theory will be reviewed in the first part of this paper. For quantitatively accurate linewidths, extrinsic dissipation mechanisms, such as impurities or disorder, have to be included. In the second part of this paper, we discuss how extrinsic dissipation can be described within the memory function formalism. We first review this formalism for homogeneous systems, and then present a synthesis of TDFT with the memory function formalism for inhomogeneous systems, to account simultaneously for intrinsic and extrinsic damping of collective excitations. As example, we calculate frequencies and linewidths of intersubband plasmons in a 40 nm wide GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well.