The bifunctional formalism: an alternative treatment of density functionals

The bifunctional formalism presents an alternative how to obtain the functional value from its functional derivative by exploiting homogeneous density scaling. In the bifunctional formalism the density dependence of the functional derivative is suppressed. Consequently, those derivatives have to be treated as formal functional derivatives. For a pointwise correspondence between the true and the formal functional derivative, the bifunctional expression yields the same value as the density functional. Within the bifunctional formalism the functional value can directly be obtained from its derivative (while the functional itself remains unknown). Since functional derivatives are up to a constant uniquely defined, this approach allows for a pointwise comparison between approximate potentials and reference potentials. This aspect is especially important in the field of orbital-free density functional theory, where the burden is to approximate the kinetic energy. Since in the bifunctional approach the potential is approximated directly, full control is given over the latter, and consequently over the final electron densities obtained from variational procedure. Besides the bifunctional formalism itself another concept is introduced, dividing the total non-interacting kinetic energy into a known functional part and a remainder, called Pauli kinetic energy. Only the remainder requires further approximations. For practical purposes sufficiently accurate Pauli potentials for application on atoms, molecular and solid-state systems are presented.