BerkeleyGW is a massively parallel computational package for electron excitedstate properties that is based on many-body perturbation theory employing the ab initio GW and GW plus Bethe-Salpeter equation methodology. It can be used in conjunction with many density-functional theory codes for groundstate properties, including PARATEC, PARSEC, Quantum ESPRESSO, SIESTA, and Octopus. The package can be used to compute the electronic and optical properties of a wide variety of material systems from bulk semiconductors and metals to nanostructured materials and molecules. The package scales to 10000s of CPUs and can be used to study systems containing up to 100s of atoms.

We present first-principles calculations of many-electron effects on the optical response of graphene, bilayer graphene, and graphite employing the GW-Bethe Salpeter equation approach. We find that resonant excitons are formed in these two-dimensional semimetals. The resonant excitons give rise to a prominent peak in the absorption spectrum near 4.5 eV with a different line shape and significantly redshifted peak position from those of an absorption peak arising from interband transitions in an independent quasiparticle picture. In the infrared regime, our calculated optical absorbance per graphene layer is approximately a constant, 2.4%, in agreement with recent experiments; additional low frequency features are found for bilayer graphene because of band structure effects.

We present the GW100 set. GW100 is a benchmark set of the ionization potentials and electron affinities of 100 molecules computed with the GW method using three independent GW codes and different GW methodologies. The quasi-particle energies of the highest-occupied molecular orbitals (HOMO) and lowest-unoccupied molecular orbitals (LUMO) are calculated for the GW100 set at the G0W0@PBE level using the software packages TURBOMOLE, FHI-aims, and BerkeleyGW. The use of these three codes allows for a quantitative comparison of the type of basis set (plane wave or local orbital) and handling of unoccupied states, the treatment of core and valence electrons (all electron or pseudopotentials), the treatment of the frequency dependence of the self-energy (full frequency or more approximate plasmon-pole models), and the algorithm for solving the quasi-particle equation. Primary results include reference values for future benchmarks, best practices for convergence within a particular approach, and average error bars for the most common approximations.