M11plus: A Range-Separated Hybrid Meta Functional with Both Local and Rung-3.5 Correlation Terms and High Across-the-Board Accuracy for Chemical Applications.
Pragya VermaBenjamin G JaneskoYing WangXiao HeGiovanni ScalmaniMichael J FrischDonald G TruhlarPublished in: Journal of chemical theory and computation (2019)
The way to improve Kohn-Sham density functional theory is to improve the exchange-correlation functionals, and functionals have been successively improved by adding new ingredients, especially local spin density gradients, nonlocal Hartree-Fock exchange, and local meta terms based on kinetic energy density. Here, we present a new kind of functional obtained by adding rung-3.5 terms to a functional including local gradients, local meta terms, and range-separated Hartree-Fock exchange. A rung-3.5 term has short-range nonlocality designed to account for nondynamic correlation; we add two kinds of rung-3.5 terms, one kind modeled on position-dependent Hartree-Fock exchange and another modeled on the spin density at a point interacting with the opposite-spin exchange hole at the same point. Optimization of the functional yields broad accuracy for both ground states and excited states with especially significant improvement for systems with strong correlation.