Quantum ESPRESSO is an integrated suite of open-source computer codes for quantum simulations of materials using state-of-the art electronic-structure techniques, based on density-functional theory, density-functional perturbation theory, and many-body perturbation theory, within the plane-wave pseudo-potential and projector-augmented-wave approaches. Quantum ESPRESSO owes its popularity to the wide variety of properties and processes it allows to simulate, to its performance on an increasingly broad array of hardware architectures, and to a community of researchers that rely on its capabilities as a core open-source development platform to implement theirs ideas. In this paper we describe recent extensions and improvements, covering new methodologies and property calculators, improved parallelization, code modularization, and extended interoperability both within the distribution and with external software.

We report a systematic study of the weak chemical bond between two benzene molecules. We first show that it is possible to obtain a very good description of the C(2) dimer and the benzene molecule by using pseudopotentials for the chemically inert 1s electrons and a resonating valence bond wave function as a variational ansatz, expanded on a relatively small Gaussian basis set. We employ an improved version of the stochastic reconfiguration technique to optimize the many-body wave function, which is the starting point for highly accurate simulations based on the lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo method. This projection technique provides a rigorous variational upper bound for the total energy, even in the presence of pseudopotentials, and substantially improves the accuracy of the trial wave function, which already yields a large fraction of the dynamical and nondynamical electron correlation. We show that the energy dispersion of two benzene molecules in the parallel displaced geometry is significantly deeper than the face-to-face configuration. However, contrary to previous studies based on post-Hartree-Fock methods, the binding energy remains weak ( approximately 2 kcal/mol) also in this geometry, and its value is in agreement with the most accurate and recent experimental findings [H. Krause et al., Chem. Phys. Lett. 184, 411 (1991)].

We introduce a new implementation of time-dependent density-functional theory which allows the entire spectrum of a molecule or extended system to be computed with a numerical effort comparable to that of a single standard ground-state calculation. This method is particularly well suited for large systems and/or large basis sets, such as plane waves or real-space grids. By using a super-operator formulation of linearized timedependent density-functional theory, we first represent the dynamical polarizability of an interacting-electron system as an off-diagonal matrix element of the resolvent of the Liouvillian super-operator. One-electron operators and density matrices are treated using a representation borrowed from time-independent density-functional perturbation theory, which permits to avoid the calculation of unoccupied Kohn-Sham orbitals. The resolvent of the Liouvillian is evaluated through a newly developed algorithm based on the non-symmetric Lanczos method. Each step of the Lanczos recursion essentially requires twice as many operations as a single step of the iterative diagonalization of the unperturbed Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian. Suitable extrapolation of the Lanczos coefficients allows for a dramatic reduction of the number of Lanczos steps necessary to obtain well converged spectra, bringing such number down to hundreds (or a few thousands, at worst) in typical plane-wave pseudopotential applications. The resulting numerical workload is only a few times larger than that needed by a ground-state Kohn-Sham calculation for a same system. Our method is demonstrated with the calculation of the spectra of benzene, C60 fullerene, and of chlorofyll a.

We describe an ab initio approach to compute the optical absorption spectra of molecules and solids, which is suitable for the study of large systems and gives access to spectra within a wide energy range. In this approach, the quantum Liouville equation is solved iteratively within first order perturbation theory, with a Hamiltonian containing a static self-energy operator. This procedure is equivalent to solving the statically screened Bethe–Salpeter equation. Explicit calculations of single particle excited states and inversion of dielectric matrices are avoided using techniques based on density functional perturbation theory. In this way, full absorption spectra may be obtained with a computational workload comparable to ground state Hartree–Fock calculations. We present results for small molecules, for the spectra of a 1 nm Si cluster in a wide energy range (20 eV), and for a dipeptide exhibiting charge transfer excitations.

Intermolecular interactions in the van der Waals bonded benzene crystal are studied from first principles, by combining exact exchange energies with correlation energies defined by the adiabatic connection fluctuation-dissipation theorem, within the random phase approximation. Correlation energies are evaluated using an iterative procedure to compute the eigenvalues of dielectric matrices, which eliminates the computation of unoccupied electronic states. Our results for the structural and binding properties of solid benzene are in very good agreement with experimental results and show that the framework adopted here is a very promising one to investigate molecular crystals and other condensed systems bound by dispersion forces.

We describe state of the art methods for the calculation of electronic excitations in solids and molecules, based on many body perturbation theory, and we discuss some applications of these methods to the study of band edges and absorption processes in representative materials used as photoelectrodes for water splitting.

We introduce turboTDDFT, an implementation of the Liouville-Lanczos approach to linearized timedependent density-functional theory, designed to simulate the optical spectra of molecular systems made of up to several hundred atoms. turboTDDFT is open-source software distributed under the terms of the GPL as a component of Quantum ESPRESSO. As with other components, turboTDDFT is optimized to run on a variety of different platforms, from laptops to massively parallel architectures, using native mathematical libraries (LAPACK and FFTW) and a hierarchy of custom parallelization layers built on top of MPI. Program summaryProgram title: turboTDDFT Catalogue identifier: AEIX_v1_0 Program summary URL: External routines: turboTDDFT is a tightly integrated component of the Quantum ESPRESSO distribution and requires the standard libraries linked by it: BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW, MPI. Nature of problem: Calculation of the optical absorption spectra of molecular systems. Solution method: The dynamical polarizability of a system is expressed in terms of the resolvent of its Liouvillian super-operator within time-dependent density-functional theory, and calculated using a non-Hermitean Lanczos method, whose implementation does not require the calculation of any virtual states. Pseudopotentials (both norm-conserving and ultrasoft) are used in conjunction with plane-wave basis sets. Restrictions: Spin-restricted formalism. Linear-response regime. No hybrid functionals. Adiabatic XC kernels only. Unusual features: No virtual orbitals are used, nor even calculated. A single Lanczos recursion gives access to the whole optical spectrum.✩ This paper and its associated computer program are available via the Computer Physics Communications homepage on ScienceDirect is requested. Instead a html file giving details of how the program can be obtained is sent.Running time: From a few minutes for small molecules on serial machines up to many hours on multiple processors for complex nanosystems with hundreds of atoms.

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