We observe that the direct Coulomb (Hartree) term appearing in the ensemble-density-functional theory for excited states contains an unphysical ("ghost") interaction which has to be corrected by the ensemble exchange and correlation functional. We propose a simple additive correction to the conventional ensemble exchange energy in the form of an orbital functional. By treating this corrected exchange energy functional self-consistently within the optimized effective potential method one finds a significant improvement of atomic excitation energies.

A novel treatment of non-adiabatic couplings is proposed. The derivation is based on a theorem by Hunter stating that the wave function of the complete system of electrons and nuclei can be written, without approximation, as a Born–Oppenheimer (BO)-type product of a nuclear wave function, X(R), and an electronic one, ΦR(r), which depends parametrically on the nuclear configuration R. From the variational principle, we deduce formally exact equations for ΦR(r) and X(R). The algebraic structure of the exact nuclear equation coincides with the corresponding one in the adiabatic approximation. The electronic equation, however, contains terms not appearing in the adiabatic case, which couple the electronic and the nuclear wave functions and account for the electron–nuclear correlation beyond the BO level. It is proposed that these terms can be incorporated using an optimized local effective potential.

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In this paper, the history, present status, and future of density-functional theory (DFT) is informally reviewed and discussed by 70 workers in the field, including molecular scientists, materials scientists, method...