Including dispersion interactions in the ONETEP program for linear-scaling density functional theory calculations

While density functional theory (DFT) allows accurate quantum mechanical simulations from first principles in molecules and solids, commonly used exchange-correlation density functionals provide a very incomplete description of dispersion interactions. One way to include such interactions is to augment the DFT energy expression by damped London energy expressions. Several variants of this have been developed for this task, which we discuss and compare in this paper. We have implemented these schemes in the ONETEP program, which is capable of DFT calculations with computational cost that increases linearly with the number of atoms. We have optimized all the parameters involved in our implementation of the dispersion correction, with the aim of simulating biomolecular systems. Our tests show that in cases where dispersion interactions are important this approach produces binding energies and molecular structures of a quality comparable with high-level wavefunction-based approaches.