Convergent and orthogonality preserving schemes for approximating the Kohn-Sham orbitals

Abstract: To obtain convergent numerical approximations without using any orthogonalization operations is of great importance in electronic structure calculations. In this paper, we propose and analyze a class of iteration schemes for the discretized Kohn- Sham Density Functional Theory model, with which the iterative approximations are guaranteed to converge to the Kohn-Sham orbitals exponentially without any orthogonalization as long as the initial orbitals are orthogonal and the time step sizes are given properly. In addition, we present a feasible and efficient approach to get suitable time step sizes and report some numerical experiments to validate our theory.