Self-interaction error in density functional theory: a mean-field correction for molecules and large systems

Corrections to the self-interaction error which is rooted in all standard exchange-correlation functionals in the density functional theory (DFT) have become the object of an increasing interest. After an introduction reminding the origin of the self-interaction error in the DFT formalism, and a brief review of the self-interaction free approximations, we present a simple, yet effective, self-consistent method to correct this error. The model is based on an average density self-interaction correction (ADSIC), where both exchange and Coulomb contributions are screened by a fraction of the electron density. The ansatz on which the method is built makes it particularly appealing, due to its simplicity and its favorable scaling with the size of the system. We have tested the ADSIC approach on one of the classical pathological problem for density functional theory: the direct estimation of the ionization potential from orbital eigenvalues. A large set of different chemical systems, ranging from simple atoms to large fullerenes, has been considered as test cases. Our results show that the ADSIC approach provides good numerical values for all the molecular systems, the agreement with the experimental values increasing, due to its average ansatz, with the size (conjugation) of the systems.