Publisher's Synopsis
Density functional theory (DFT) provides the most widely used models for simulating molecules and materials based on the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. It plays a central role in a huge spectrum of applications in chemistry, physics, and materials science.
Quantum mechanics describes a system of N interacting particles in the physical 3-dimensional space by a partial differential equation in 3N spatial variables. The standard numerical methods thus incur an exponential increase of computational effort with N, a phenomenon known as the curse of dimensionality; in practice these methods already fail beyond N=2.
DFT overcomes this problem by
1) reformulating the N-body problem involving functions of 3N variables in terms of the density, a function of 3 variables,
2) approximating it by a pioneering hybrid approach which keeps important ab initio contributions and re-models the remainder in a data-driven way.
