Physics team fixes a major flaw in popular materials prediction tool

<p>The recent nonempirical semilocal exchange functional of Armiento and Kummel [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 036402 (2013)], AK13, incorporates a number of features reproduced by higher-order theory. The AK13 potential behaves analogously with the discontinuous jump associated with the derivative discontinuity at integer particle numbers. Recent works have established that AK13 gives a qualitatively improved orbital description compared to other semilocal methods, and reproduces a band structure closer to higher-order theory. However, its energies and energetics are inaccurate. The present work further investigates the deficiency in energetics. In addition to AK13 results, we find that applying the local-density approximation (LDA) non-self-consistently on the converged AK13 density gives very reasonable energetics with equilibrium lattice constants and bulk moduli well described across 13 systems. We also confirm that the attractive orbital features of AK13 are retained even after full structural relaxation. Hence, the deficient energetics cannot be a result of the AK13 orbitals having adversely affected the quality of the electron density compared to that of usual semilocal functionals; an improved orbital description and good energetics are not in opposition. This is also confirmed by direct calculation of the principal component of the electric field gradient. In addition, we prove that the non-self-consistent scheme is equivalent to using a single external-potential-dependent functional in an otherwise consistent, nonvariational Kohn-Sham density-functional theory (KS DFT) scheme. Furthermore, our results also demonstrate that, while an internally consistent KS functional is presently missing, non-self-consistent LDA on AK13 orbitals works as a practical nonempirical computational scheme to predict geometries, bulk moduli, while retaining the band structure features of AK13 at the computational cost of semi-local DFT.</p>