The Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package, better known as VASP, is a package written primarily in Fortran for performing ab initio quantum mechanical calculations using either Vanderbilt pseudopotentials, or the projector augmented wave method, and a plane wave basis set. The basic methodology is density functional theory (DFT), but the code also allows use of post-DFT corrections such as hybrid functionals mixing DFT and Hartree–Fock exchange, many-body perturbation theory and dynamical electronic correlations within the random phase approximation (RPA) and MP2.
In physics, a pseudopotential or effective potential is used as an approximation for the simplified description of complex systems. Applications include atomic physics and neutron scattering. The pseudopotential approximation was first introduced by Hans Hellmann in 1934.
In theoretical and computational chemistry, a basis set is a set of functions that is used to represent the electronic wave function in the Hartree–Fock method or density-functional theory in order to turn the partial differential equations of the model into algebraic equations suitable for efficient implementation on a computer.
Amsterdam Density Functional (ADF) is a program for first-principles electronic structure calculations that makes use of density functional theory (DFT). ADF was first developed in the early seventies by the group of E. J. Baerends from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and by the group of T. Ziegler from the University of Calgary. Nowadays many other academic groups are contributing to the software. Software for Chemistry & Materials (SCM), formerly known as Scientific Computing & Modelling is a spin-off company from the Baerends group. SCM has been coordinating the development and distribution of ADF since 1995. Together with the rise in popularity of DFT in the nineties, ADF has become a popular computational chemistry software package used in the industrial and academic research. ADF excels in spectroscopy, transition metals, and heavy elements problems. A periodic structure counterpart of ADF named BAND is available to study bulk crystals, polymers, and surfaces. The Amsterdam Modeling Suite has expanded beyond DFT since 2010, with the semi-empirical MOPAC code, the Quantum ESPRESSO plane wave code, a density-functional based tight binding (DFTB) module, a reactive force field module ReaxFF, and an implementation of Klamt's COSMO-RS method, which also includes COSMO-SAC, UNIFAC, and QSPR.
CASTEP is a shared-source academic and commercial software package which uses density functional theory with a plane wave basis set to calculate the electronic properties of crystalline solids, surfaces, molecules, liquids and amorphous materials from first principles. CASTEP permits geometry optimisation and finite temperature molecular dynamics with implicit symmetry and geometry constraints, as well as calculation of a wide variety of derived properties of the electronic configuration. Although CASTEP was originally a serial, Fortran 77-based program, it was completely redesigned and rewritten from 1999 to 2001 using Fortran 95 and MPI for use on parallel computers by researchers at the Universities of York, Durham, St. Andrews, Cambridge and Rutherford Labs.
ABINIT is an open-source suite of programs for materials science, distributed under the GNU General Public License. ABINIT implements density functional theory, using a plane wave basis set and pseudopotentials, to compute the electronic density and derived properties of materials ranging from molecules to surfaces to solids. It is developed collaboratively by researchers throughout the world. A web-based easy-to-use graphical version, which includes access to a limited set of ABINIT's full functionality, is available for free use through the nanohub.
SIESTA is an original method and its computer program implementation, to efficiently perform electronic structure calculations and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of molecules and solids. SIESTA uses strictly localized basis sets and the implementation of linear-scaling algorithms. Accuracy and speed can be set in a wide range, from quick exploratory calculations to highly accurate simulations matching the quality of other approaches, such as the plane-wave and all-electron methods.
Octopus is a software package for performing Kohn–Sham density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) calculations.
Car–Parrinello molecular dynamics or CPMD refers to either a method used in molecular dynamics or the computational chemistry software package used to implement this method.
PARSEC is a package designed to perform electronic structure calculations of solids and molecules using density functional theory (DFT). The acronym stands for Pseudopotential Algorithm for Real-Space Electronic Calculations. It solves the Kohn–Sham equations in real space, without the use of explicit basis sets.
The WIEN2k package is a computer program written in Fortran which performs quantum mechanical calculations on periodic solids. It uses the full-potential (linearized) augmented plane-wave and local-orbitals [FP-(L)APW+lo] basis set to solve the Kohn–Sham equations of density functional theory.
PARATEC is a package that performs ab initio quantum mechanical total energy calculations using pseudopotentials and a plane wave basis set. PARATEC is designed primarily for a massively parallel computing platform, and can run on serial machines. Calculations of XANES within such a full-potential approach has been implemented within PARATEC.
CP2K is a freely available (GPL) quantum chemistry and solid state physics program package, written in Fortran 2008, to perform atomistic simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems. It provides a general framework for different methods: density functional theory (DFT) using a mixed Gaussian and plane waves approach (GPW) via LDA, GGA, MP2, or RPA levels of theory, classical pair and many-body potentials, semi-empirical and tight-binding Hamiltonians, as well as Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM) hybrid schemes relying on the Gaussian Expansion of the Electrostatic Potential (GEEP). The Gaussian and Augmented Plane Waves method (GAPW) as an extension of the GPW method allows for all-electron calculations. CP2K can do simulations of molecular dynamics, metadynamics, Monte Carlo, Ehrenfest dynamics, vibrational analysis, core level spectroscopy, energy minimization, and transition state optimization using NEB or dimer method.
Yambo is a computer software package for studying many-body theory aspects of solids and molecule systems. It calculates the excited state properties of physical systems from first principles, e.g., from quantum mechanics law without the use of empirical data. It is an open-source software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). However the main development repository is private and only a subset of the features available in the private repository are cloned into the public repository and thus distributed.
BigDFT is a free software package for physicists and chemists, distributed under the GNU General Public License, whose main program allows the total energy, charge density, and electronic structure of systems made of electrons and nuclei to be calculated within density functional theory (DFT), using pseudopotentials, and a wavelet basis.
The projector augmented wave method (PAW) is a technique used in ab initio electronic structure calculations. It is a generalization of the pseudopotential and linear augmented-plane-wave methods, and allows for density functional theory calculations to be performed with greater computational efficiency.
Computational materials science and engineering uses modeling, simulation, theory, and informatics to understand materials. The main goals include discovering new materials, determining material behavior and mechanisms, explaining experiments, and exploring materials theories. It is analogous to computational chemistry and computational biology as an increasingly important subfield of materials science.
Qbox is an open-source software package for atomic-scale simulations of molecules, liquids and solids. It implements first principles molecular dynamics, a simulation method in which inter-atomic forces are derived from quantum mechanics. Qbox is released under a GNU General Public License (GPL) with documentation provided at http://qboxcode.org. It is available as a FreeBSD port.
The linearized augmented-plane-wave method (LAPW) is an implementation of Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT) adapted to periodic materials. It typically goes along with the treatment of both valence and core electrons on the same footing in the context of DFT and the treatment of the full potential and charge density without any shape approximation. This is often referred to as the all-electron full-potential linearized augmented-plane-wave method (FLAPW). It does not rely on the pseudopotential approximation and employs a systematically extendable basis set. These features make it one of the most precise implementations of DFT, applicable to all crystalline materials, regardless of their chemical composition. It can be used as a reference for evaluating other approaches.
The FLEUR code is an open-source scientific software package for the simulation of material properties of crystalline solids, thin films, and surfaces. It implements Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT) in terms of the all-electron full-potential linearized augmented-plane-wave method. With this, it is a realization of one of the most precise DFT methodologies. The code has the common features of a modern DFT simulation package. In the past, major applications have been in the field of magnetism, spintronics, quantum materials, e.g. in ultrathin films, complex magnetism like in spin spirals or magnetic Skyrmion lattices, and in spin-orbit related physics, e.g. in graphene and topological insulators.
