Linear Multigrid Techniques in Self-consistent Electronic Structure Calculations

Ab initio DFT electronic structure calculations involve an iterative process to solve the Kohn-Sham equations for an Hamiltonian depending on the electronic density. We discretize these equations on a grid by finite differences. Trial eigenfunctions are improved at each step of the algorithm using multigrid techniques to efficiently reduce the error at all length scale, until self-consistency is achieved. In this paper we focus on an iterative eigensolver based on the idea of inexact inverse iteration, using multigrid as a preconditioner. We also discuss how this technique can be used for electrons described by general non-orthogonal wave functions, and how that leads to a linear scaling with the system size for the computational cost of the most expensive parts of the algorithm