Extending Hirshfeld-I to bulk and periodic materials

D.E.P. Vanpoucke, P. Bultinck, I. Van Driessche
Journal of Computational Chemistry
Volume 34, Issue 5, pages 405-417
2013
A1
Published while none of the authors were employed at the CMM

Abstract 

In this work, a method is described to extend the iterative Hirshfeld-I method, generally used for molecules, to periodic systems. The implementation makes use of precalculated pseudopotential-based electron density distributions, and it is shown that high-quality results are obtained for both molecules and solids, such as ceria, diamond, and graphite. The use of grids containing (precalculated) electron densities makes the implementation independent of the solid state or quantum chemical code used for studying the system. The extension described here allows for easy calculation of atomic charges and charge transfer in periodic and bulk systems. The conceptual issue of obtaining reference densities for anions is discussed, and the delocalization problem for anionic reference densities originating from the use of a plane wave basis set is identified and handled.

Open Access version available at UGent repository