Assessment of a long-range corrected hybrid functional

Common approximate exchange-correlation functionals suffer from self-interaction error, and as a result, their corresponding potentials have incorrect asymptotic behavior. The exact asymptote can be imposed by introducing range separation into the exchange component and replacing the long-range portion of the approximate exchange by the Hartree-Fock counterpart. The authors show that this long-range correction works particularly well in combination with the short-range variant of the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) exchange functional. This long-range-corrected hybrid, here denoted LC-omega PBE, is remarkably accurate for a broad range of molecular properties, such as thermochemistry, barrier heights of chemical reactions, bond lengths, and most notably, description of processes involving long-range charge transfer. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.