The diabatic picture of electron transfer, reaction barriers, and molecular dynamics.

Diabatic states have a long history in chemistry, beginning with early valence bond pictures of molecular bonding and extending through the construction of model potential energy surfaces to the modern proliferation of methods for computing these elusive states. In this review, we summarize the basic principles that define the diabatic basis and demonstrate how they can be applied in the specific context of constrained density functional theory. Using illustrative examples from electron transfer and chemical reactions, we show how the diabatic picture can be used to extract qualitative insight and quantitative predictions about energy landscapes.

Rydberg energies using excited state density functional theory.

We utilize excited state density functional theory (eDFT) to study Rydberg states in atoms. We show both analytically and numerically that semilocal functionals can give quite reasonable Rydberg energies from eDFT, even in cases where time dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) fails catastrophically. We trace these findings to the fact that in eDFT the Kohn-Sham potential for each state is computed using the appropriate excited state density.

Configuration interaction based on constrained density functional theory: a multireference method.

Existing density functional theory (DFT) methods are typically very effective in capturing dynamic correlation, but run into difficulty treating near-degenerate systems where static correlation becomes important. In this work, we propose a configuration interaction (CI) method that allows one to use a multireference approach to treat static correlation but incorporates DFT's efficacy for the dynamic part as well. The new technique uses localized charge or spin states built by a constrained DFT approach to construct an active space in which the effective Hamiltonian matrix is built.