Failure of the local density approximation in time-dependent spin density functional theory

Abstract

It has been known for some time that the exchange-correlation potential in time-dependent density functional theory is an intrinsically nonlocal functional of the density as soon as one goes beyond the adiabatic approximation. In this paper we show that a much more severe nonlocality problem, with a completely different physical origin, plagues the exchange-correlation potentials in time-dependent spin density functional theory. We show how the use of the spin current density as the basic variable solves this problem, and we provide an explicit local expression for the exchange-correlation fields as functionals of the spin currents.