The treatment of van der Waals interactions in density functional theory is an important field of ongoing research. Among different approaches developed recently to capture these non-local interactions, the van der Waals density functional (vdW-DF) developed in the groups of Langreth and Lundqvist is becoming increasingly popular. It does not rely on empirical parameters, and has been successfu...

A recent extensive study has investigated how various exchange-correlation (XC) functionals treat hydrogen bonds in water hexamers and has shown traditional generalized gradient approximation and hybrid functionals used in density-functional (DF) theory to give the wrong dissociation-energy trend of low-lying isomers and van der Waals (vdW) dispersion forces to give key contributions to the dis...

We use density functional theory calculations with van der Waals corrections to study the role of dispersive interactions on the structure and binding of CO(2) within two distinct metal-organic frameworks (MOFs): Mg-MOF74 and Ca-BTT. For both classes of MOFs, we report calculations with standard gradient-corrected (PBE) and five van der Waals density functionals (vdW-DFs), also comparing with s...

Is the plasmon description within the nonlocal correlation of the van der Waals density functional by Dion and coworkers (vdW-DF) robust enough to describe all exchange-correlation components? To address this question, we design an exchange functional based on this plasmon description as well as recent analysis on exchange in the large-s regime. In the regime with reduced gradients s = |∇n|/2nk...

The theoretical description of sparse matter attracts much interest, in particular for those ground-state properties that can be described by density functional theory. One proposed approach, the van der Waals density functional (vdW-DF) method, rests on strong physical foundations and offers simple yet accurate and robust functionals. A very recent functional within this method called vdW-DF-c...

First-principles calculations of phenol adsorbed on two different surfaces, graphite 0001 and -Al2O3 0001 , are performed with traditional semilocal density functional theory DFT and with a recently presented density functional vdW-DF that incorporates the dispersive van der Waals vdW interactions Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 246401 2004 . The vdW-DF is of decisive importance for describing the vdW bon...

It is known that ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations of liquid water at ambient conditions, based on the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) to density functional theory (DFT), with commonly used functionals fail to produce structural and diffusive properties in reasonable agreement with experiment. This is true for canonical, constant temperature simulations where the density ...

A density functional theory (DFT) that accounts for van der Waals (vdW) interactions in condensed matter, materials physics, chemistry, and biology is reviewed. The insights that led to the construction of the Rutgers-Chalmers van der Waals density functional (vdW-DF) are presented with the aim of giving a historical perspective, while also emphasizing more recent efforts which have sought to i...

The self-assembly of flat organic molecules on metal surfaces is controlled, apart from the kinetic factors, by the interplay between the molecule-molecule and molecule-surface interactions. These are typically calculated using standard density functional theory within the generalized gradient approximation, which significantly underestimates nonlocal correlations, i.e. van der Waals (vdW) cont...

Two different adsorption configurations of benzene on the Si(001)-(2×1) surface, the tight-bridge and butterfly structures, were studied using density functional theory. Several exchange and correlation functionals were used, including the recently developed vdW-DF functional, which accounts for the effect of van der Waals forces. In contrast to the PBE, revPBE and other GGA functionals, the vd...