Van der Waals Density Functional for Molecular Crystals

Abstract: Since the development of the nonlocal correlation functional vdW-DF, the family of van der Waals density functionals has grown to better describe a wide variety of systems. A recent generation of the vdW-DF family, vdW-DF3, featured a newly-constructed form of the nonlocal correlation that more accurately modeled molecular dimers, layered structures, and surface adsorption. However, it also revealed an intrinsic tradeoff in vdW-DF3's parametrization and inflexibility of exchange in the generalized gradient approximation (GGA), limiting its accuracy for molecular crystals. In this paper we propose a new optimization of vdW-DF3 that is tailored to 3D molecular crystals. This functional, called vdW-DF3-mc, contains a new, tunable form of the exchange enhancement factor with parameters that directly correspond to physically relevant qualities. In addition, within the nonlocal correlation, we prioritize smoothness of the kernel switching function as a means of restoring flexibility to vdW-DF3's design. Testing vdW-DF3-mc on several benchmark sets, we achieve highly accurate energetics and geometries for molecular crystals. This is particularly evident for the case of polymorphs of ice, for which errors in the volume and cohesive energy are on the order of only 1%, indicating very promising performance for important subcategories of molecular crystals, such as polymorphism and hydrogen-bonded solids.