Bypassing the energy functional in density functional theory: Direct calculation of electronic energies from conditional probability densities

Density functional calculations can fail for want of an accurate exchange-correlation approximation. The energy can instead be extracted from a sequence of density functional calculations of conditional probabilities (CP-DFT). Simple CP approximations yield usefully accurate results for two-electron ions, the hydrogen dimer, and the uniform gas at all temperatures. CP-DFT has no self-interaction error for one electron, and correctly dissociates H2, both major challenges. For warm dense matter, classical CP-DFT calculations can overcome the convergence problems of Kohn-Sham DFT.

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