Relativistic fully self-consistent $GW$ for molecules: Total energies and ionization potentials

Abstract

The fully self-consistent $GW$ (sc$GW$) method with the iterative solution of Dyson equation provides a consistent approach for describing the ground and excited states without any dependence on the mean-field reference. In this work, we present a relativistic version of sc$GW$ for molecules containing heavy element using the exact two-component (X2C) Coulomb approximation. We benchmark $\texttt{SOC-81}$ dataset containing closed shell heavy elements for the first ionization potential using the fully self-consistent $GW$ as well as one-shot $GW$. The self-consistent $GW$ provides superior result compared to $G_0W_0$ with PBE reference and comparable to $G_0W_0$ with PBE0 while also removing the starting point dependence. The photoelectron spectra obtained at the X2C level demonstrate very good agreement with experimental spectra. We also observe that sc$GW$ provides very good estimation of ionization potential for the inner $d$ shell orbitals. Additionally, using the well conserved total energy, we investigate the equilibrium bond length and harmonic frequencies of few halogen dimers using sc$GW$. Overall, our findings demonstrate the applicability of the fully self-consistent $GW$ method for accurate ionization potential, photoelectron spectra and total energies in finite systems with heavy elements with a reasonable computational scaling.