Requirements for very high temperature Kohn–Sham DFT simulations and how to bypass them

Abstract

In density functional high temperature simulations (from tens of eV to keV) the total number of Kohn-Sham orbitals is a critical quantity to get sound results. The occupation of the highest orbital in energy is here derived from the properties of the homogeneous electron gas, which gives a prescription on the total number of orbitals to reach a given level of occupation. Very low levels of occupation (10-5 to 10-6) must be considered to get convergence with Kohn-Sham orbitals, making high temperature simulations unreachable beyond a few tens of eV. After testing these predictions against ABINIT oftware package results, we test the implementation of the Extended method of Zhang et al. [PoP 23 042707, 2016] in the ABINIT package to adress very high temperatures by bypassing these strong orbital constraint.