72 Charged Particle and Photon Interactions with Matter
the oscillator strength distribution around the ionization threshold cannot be described accurately in
the LDA. To remedy the failure of the LDA, a gradient corrected potential, the LB94, was proposed
(Van Leeuwen and Baerends, 1994). In the LB94, a term depending on the gradient of the density,
∇n(r), produces the potential that shows the correct asymptotic behavior. The ionization potentials
are also reproduced rather accurately. In our calculations presented below, we will employ the LB94
potential unless otherwise stated.
For an accurate description of low-lying excitations in molecules, assessment regarding the accuracy
of exchange-correlation potentials has been extensively achieved in quantum chemistry calcula-
tions. We quote a few references for such researches (Casida et al., 1998; Furche and Ahlrichs, 2002;
Dreuw
and Head-Gordon, 2005).
4.3 Computational details
The calculations of the oscillator strength distribution with the linear response TDDFT have
been rst achieved in the early 1980s for spherical systems, such as atoms and metallic clusters.
For spherical systems, χ
0
(r, r′,ω) dened by Equation 4.25 is a rotationally invariant kernel, and
Equations 4.23 and 4.24 for δn(r,ω) may be solved for each multipole component separately. The
equation for each multipole component is an integral equation of radial variable only, and can easily
be solved numerically. Also, the outgoing boundary condition for emitted electrons may easily be
incorporated
in the partial wave expansion for the wave functions.
For
systems without spherical symmetry, on the other hand, an explicit construction of the inde-
pendent-particle response function given by Equation 4.25 is numerically demanding, since it is a
function of two coordinate variables, r and r′. This is especially true in the Cartesian-coordinate
grid representation that we adopted here. For this reason, several efcient computational approaches
that avoid an explicit construction of the response function χ
0
have been developed. In this section,
we
outline briey the computational methods that we adopted in the calculations presented later.
4.3.1 real-Space grid repreSentation
To express orbital wave functions ψ
i
(r,t), we employ a three-dimensional Cartesian-coordinate grid rep-
resentation (Chelikowsky et al., 1994). We treat valence electrons explicitly, employing the so-called,
norm-conserving pseudopotential for electron–ion interaction (Troullier and Martins, 1991). We treat H
+
,
C
4+
, N
5+
, and O
6+
as cores. The pseudopotential is further approximated to be a separable form, known
as the Kleinman–Bylander form (Kleinman and Bylander, 1982). This is a standard prescription in the
rst-principles DFT calculations with grid representation in either momentum or real-space grid repre-
sentation. We thus freeze the core electrons ignoring their polarization effects. The typical grid spacing
is 0.5 a.u.: this is ne enough to describe valence electron dynamics. We take grid points inside a cubic
box area. The typical size of the box is 60 a.u. in one side, which includes 120
3
grid points.
4.3.2 real-tiMe Method
The real-time method solving the TDKS equation in time domain is one of the straightforward ways
to calculate the polarizability of the whole spectral region (Yabana and Bertsch, 1996). As explained
in Equation 4.2, the dipole polarizability α
μν
(ω) is dened as a proportion coefcient between the
induced polarization, p
μ
(t), and the applied external electric eld, E
ν
(t), of a xed frequency, ω, applied
to ν-direction, E
ν
(t) = E
0
e
−iωt
. Now let us consider an induced dipole moment p
μ
(t) for an electric eld of
arbitrary time prole in ν-direction. In the linear response regime, each ω component of p
μ
(t) and E
ν
(t)
should be related by the dipole polarizability, α
μν
(ω), since there holds a principle of superposition,
dt e p t dt e E t
i t i tω
µ µν
ω
ν
α ω( ) ( ) ( ).=
(4.28)