No abstract

Self-consistent GW calculations, maintaining only the quasiparticle part of the Green's function G, are reported for a wide class of materials, including small gap semiconductors and large gap insulators. We show that the inclusion of the attractive electron-hole interaction via an effective nonlocal exchange correlation kernel is required to obtain accurate band gaps in the framework of self-consistent GW calculations. If these are accounted for via vertex corrections in W, the band gaps are found to be within a few percent of the experimental values.

Algorithmic details and results of fully frequency-dependent G 0 W 0 calculations are presented. The implementation relies on the spectral representation of the involved matrices and their Hilbert or Kramers-Kronig transforms to obtain the polarizability and self-energy matrices at each frequency. Using this approach, the computational time for the calculation of polarizability matrices and quasiparticle energies is twice as that for a single frequency, plus Hilbert transforms. In addition, the implementation relies on the PAW method, which allows to treat d-states with relatively modest effort and permits the reevaluation of the core-valence interaction on the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation. Tests performed on an sp material ͑Si͒ and materials with d electrons ͑GaAs and CdS͒ yield quasiparticle energies that are very close to previous all-electron pseudopotential and all-electron full-potential linear muffin-tin-orbital calculations.

We present a comparative full-potential study of generalized Kohn-Sham schemes (gKS) with explicit focus on their suitability as starting point for the solution of the quasiparticle equation. We compare $G_0W_0$ quasiparticle band structures calculated upon LDA, sX, HSE03, PBE0, and HF functionals for exchange and correlation (XC) for Si, InN and ZnO. Furthermore, the HSE03 functional is studied and compared to the GGA for 15 non-metallic materials for its use as a starting point in the calculation of quasiparticle excitation energies. For this case, also the effects of selfconsistency in the $GW$ self-energy are analysed. It is shown that the use of a gKS scheme as a starting point for a perturbative QP correction can improve upon the deficiencies found for LDA or GGA staring points for compounds with shallow $d$ bands. For these solids, the order of the valence and conduction bands is often inverted using local or semi-local approximations for XC, which makes perturbative $G_0W_0$ calculations unreliable. The use of a gKS starting point allows for the calculation of fairly accurate band gaps even in these difficult cases, and generally single-shot $G_0W_0$ calculations following calculations using the HSE03 functional are very close to experiment

The well-ordered aluminum oxide film formed by oxidation of the NiAl(110) surface is the most intensely studied metal surface oxide, but its structure was previously unknown. We determined the structure by extensive ab initio modeling and scanning tunneling microscopy experiments. Because the topmost aluminum atoms are pyramidally and tetrahedrally coordinated, the surface is different from all Al2O3 bulk phases. The film is a wide-gap insulator, although the overall stoichiometry of the film is not Al2O3 but Al10O13. We propose that the same building blocks can be found on the surfaces of bulk oxides, such as the reduced corundum (0001) surface.