Mathematical expression of SCAN (Strongly Constrained and Appropriately Normed) constraints in DFT

(This question is originally posted on physics stackexchange, but someone suggested me to post on this site, so there you go)

I'm compiling the mathematical expression of SCAN (Strongly Constrained and Appropriately Normed) functionals' constraints, but apparently they are not very obvious from their paper (at least for me). I have compiled some constraints from the SCAN paper, the PBE paper, and Perdew's presentation, but some are missing (see the last line of this question).

General form

\begin{align} E_{xc}[n] &= \int n \varepsilon_x^{unif}(n) F_{xc}(s,\alpha)\ \mathrm{d}\mathbf{r} \\ E_x[n] &= \int n \varepsilon_x^{unif}(n) F_x(s,\alpha)\ \mathrm{d}\mathbf{r} \\ E_c[n] &= \int n \varepsilon_x^{unif}(n) F_c(r_s,t,\zeta,\alpha)\ \mathrm{d}\mathbf{r} = \int n\left[\varepsilon_c^{unif} + H(r_s,t,\zeta,\alpha)\right]\ \mathrm{d}\mathbf{r} \\ \end{align} where $$\varepsilon_x^{unif}(n) = -(3/4\pi)(3\pi^2n)^{1/3}$$ and $$\varepsilon_c^{unif}$$ are obtained from Perdew & Wang, 1992 and the variables $$s,\alpha, r_s,t,\zeta$$ are listed in SCAN's paper supplementary material.

Exchange constraints

1. Negativity $$F_x(s,\alpha) > 0$$
2. Spin-scaling $$E_x[n_{\uparrow}, n_{\downarrow}] = \frac{1}{2}\left(E_x[2n_{\uparrow}] + E_x[2n_{\downarrow}]\right)$$
3. Uniform density scaling $$E_x[n_\gamma] = \gamma E_x[n]\mathrm{, where}\ n_\gamma(\mathbf{r}) = \gamma^3 n(\gamma \mathbf{r})$$
4. Fourth order gradient expansion (the expression is from Perdew's presentation) $$\lim_{s\rightarrow 0, \alpha\rightarrow 1} F_x(s,\alpha) = 1 + \frac{10}{81}s^2 - \frac{1606}{18225} s^4 + \frac{511}{13500} s^2(1-\alpha) + \frac{5913}{405000}(1-\alpha)^2$$
5. Non-uniform density scaling $$\lim_{s\rightarrow\infty}F_x(s,\alpha) \propto s^{-1/2}$$
6. Tight lower bound for two electron densities $$F_x(s,\alpha=0) \leq 1.174$$

Correlation constraints

1. Non-positivity $$F_c(r_s,t,\zeta,\alpha) \geq 0$$
2. Second order gradient expansion \begin{align} \lim_{t\rightarrow 0}H(r_s, \zeta, t, \alpha) &= \beta \phi^3 t^2 \\ \beta &\approx 0.066725 \end{align}
3. Rapidly varying limit (using the term from PBE's paper, instead of from SCAN's paper, is it "Uniform density scaling to the low density limit"?) $$\lim_{t\rightarrow\infty}H(r_s, \zeta, t, \alpha) = -\varepsilon_c^{unif}$$
4. Uniform density scaling to the high density limit \begin{align} \lim_{r_s\rightarrow 0}H(r_s, \zeta, t, \alpha) &= \gamma \phi^3\ln \left(t^2\right) \\ \gamma &= \frac{1}{\pi} (1 - \ln 2) \end{align}
5. Zero correlation energy for one electron densities $$H(r_s, \zeta=1, t, \alpha=0) = -\varepsilon_c^{unif}$$
6. Finite non-uniform scaling limit (I don't know this)

Exchange and correlation constraints

1. Size extensivity (I don't know this)

2. General Lieb-Oxford bound $$F_{xc}(r_s, \zeta, t, \alpha) \leq 2.215$$

3. Weak dependence upon relative spin polarization in the low-density limit (I don't know this)

4. Static linear response of the uniform electron gas (I don't know this)

5. Lieb-Oxford bound for two-electron densities $$F_{xc}(r_s, \zeta=0, t, \alpha=0) \leq 1.67$$

Summary: What are the constraints for 12, 13, 15, 16? If you want, you can give one constraint in one answer.

• +10. Great question! We are very happy to see you here, and hope to see you more !!! – Nike Dattani Jun 17 '20 at 16:44
• Thanks! How do you judge if a certain functional satisfy the size extensivity constraint? Is being semi-local (e.g. LDA, GGA, MetaGGA) automatically satisfy the size extensivity? – Firman Jun 17 '20 at 20:12

Constraint #13: Size-Extensivity

While the Wikipedia page for size-consistency and size-extensivity gives a clear formula for the definition of size-consistency, unfortunately they did not give a definition of size-extensivity, so I had to look deeper into the reference that they provided. They say that size-extensivity was introduced by Bartlett, and they cite this review paper of his from 1981, but this paper itself credits the following papers, which I have now looked at for the first time and summarized below:

• (1955) Keith Brueckner first recognized in his study of the uniform electron gas, that some terms in the energy obtained by Rayleigh-Schroedinger perturbation theory, incorrectly do not scale linearly with the number of electrons $$N$$ as $$N\rightarrow \infty$$. He found a way to cancel out all of these spurious terms, up to fourth-order in the perturbation theory. These spurious terms are also the reason why CI (configuration interaction) converges slowly with respect to the number of excitations included. A year later, Brueckner published the paper with Gell-Mann that became the subject of my other answer here. He was one of the all-time greats, and lived to 90.
• (1957) Jeffrey Golstone proved the "linked-diagram theorem" which ensures that the spurious terms found by Brueckner, get cancelled out to all orders in perturbation theory. Goldstone by the way, is one of the most influential physicists that's still alive! He's currently 85 and he was even a co-author on the quite recent paper that popularized Adiabatic Quantum Computing :)
• (1965) Bartlett's review paper says that Hans Primas was actually the one to first really emphasize this concept of having proper scaling. I don't know much about Primas, though I found that he survived to the age of 86 :)
• (1971-1973) Wilfried Meyer used this concept of size-extensivity to justify the CEPA model. At the time, Meyer had just finished making the MOLPRO software in the 1960s, a software which is now more than 50 years later, maybe the most popular quantum chemistry software for fast high-accuracy calculations.
• (1978) Bartlett and Purvis used the term "size-extensivity" here, so this is perhaps where the term was first introduced, but he uses it to describe what the 1955 and 1957 papers achieved.

So what is size-extensivity?

My reading of the above Bartlett papers tells me that for a homogenous system like an electron gas or a set of non-interacting He atoms, the energy should scale linearly with the number of particles and that the concept can also be generalized to properties other than energy.

• Exactly, twice as much stuff should have twice the energy. It might sound obvious, but not all functionals have this property, e.g. the Tran-Blaha functional (although that is a little unfair as an example, since it wasn't ever intended as a "proper" functional). – Phil Hasnip Jun 29 '20 at 2:11