Published January 6, 2023 | Version v1
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Hubbard U through polaronic defect states

  • 1. Chaire de Simulation à l'Echelle Atomique (CSEA), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

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Description

Since the preliminary work of Anisimov and co-workers, the Hubbard corrected DFT+U functional has been used for predicting properties of correlated materials by applying on-site effective Coulomb interactions to specific orbitals. However, the determination of the Hubbard U parameter has remained under intense discussion despite the multitude of approaches proposed. Here, we define a selection criterion based on the use of polaronic defect states for the enforcement of the piecewise linearity of the total energy upon electron occupation. A good agreement with results from piecewise-linear hybrid functionals is found for the electronic and structural properties of polarons, including the formation energies. The values of U determined in this way are found to give a robust description of the polaron energetics upon variation of the considered state. In particular, we also address a polaron hopping pathway, finding that the determined value of U leads to accurate energetics without requiring a configurational-dependent U. It is emphasized that the selection of U should be based on physical properties directly associated with the orbitals to which U is applied, rather than on more global properties such as band gaps and band widths. For comparison, we also determine U through a well-established linear-response scheme finding noticeably different values of U and consequently different formation energies. Possible origins of these discrepancies are discussed. As case studies, we consider the self-trapped electron in BiVO₄, the self-trapped hole in MgO, the Li-trapped hole in MgO, and the Al-trapped hole in 𝛼-SiO₂.

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References

Journal reference (Paper in which the method is described)
Falletta, S., Pasquarello, A. Hubbard U through polaronic defect states, npj Computational Materials 8, 263 (2022), doi: 10.1038/s41524-022-00958-6