Efficient numerical solver for first-principles transport calculation based on real-space finite-difference method

Abstract: We propose an efficient procedure to obtain Green's functions by combining the shifted conjugate orthogonal conjugate gradient (shifted COCG) method with the nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) method based on a real-space finite-difference (RSFD) approach. The bottleneck of the computation in the NEGF scheme is matrix inversion of the Hamiltonian including the self-energy terms of electrodes to obtain perturbed Green's function in the transition region. This procedure first computes unperturbed Green's functions and calculates perturbed Green's functions from the unperturbed ones using a mathematically strict relation. Since the matrices to be inverted to obtain the unperturbed Green's functions are sparse, complex-symmetric and shifted for a given set of sampling energy points, we can use the shifted COCG method, in which once the Green's function for a reference energy point has been calculated, the Green's functions for the other energy points can be obtained with a moderate computational cost. We calculate the transport properties of a C$_{60}$@(10,10) carbon nanotube (CNT) peapod suspended by (10,10)CNTs as an example of a large-scale transport calculation. The proposed scheme opens the possibility of performing large-scale RSFD-NEGF transport calculations using massively parallel computers without the loss of accuracy originating from the incompleteness of the localized basis set.