A Critical Evaluation of the Hybrid KS DFT Functionals Based on the KS Exchange-Correlation Potentials

Abstract

We have developed a critical methodology for the evaluation of the quality of hybrid exchange-correlation (XC) density functional approximations (DFAs) based on very fundamental quantities, i.e., Kohn-Sham (KS) XC potentials, self-consistent electron densities, first ionization potentials (IPs), and total energies. Since the XC potentials, the primary objects in the current study, are not directly accessible for the hybrids, we calculate them by inverting the KS electron densities. Utilizing this methodology, we tested 155 hybrid DFAs available in the LIBXC library using FCI and CCSD(T) methods as a reference. We have found that a group of functionals produces very decent XC potentials, mainly those with a large mixture of Hartree-Fock exchange. Moreover, the value of IP strongly depends on the XC potential quality. On the other hand, we show that the XC energy is dominated by functional-driven error, which in some cases leads to substantial errors in electronic densities. The study shows new directions for constructing more accurate XC functionals within the KS-DFT framework.