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Optics of semiconductors and insulators: Role of local-field effects revised

We show that by nullifying the short-wave response to the long-wave excitation (local-field-effects), the adiabatic time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT) of optics of semiconductors and insulators can be brought into excellent agreement with experiment. This indicates that the wing elements [($\Gv,\0v)$ and $(\0v,\Gv)$, $\Gv\ne\0v$] of both the Kohn-Sham (KS) density-response function $χ^s$ and the exchange-correlation kernel $f^{xc}$ are greatly overestimated by the existing approximations to the static DFT and TDDFT, respectively, to the extent that zero is a better approximation for them than the corresponding values provided by current theories. The head element of $f^{xc}$ is thereby fixed by the static macroscopic dielectric constant $ε_M$. Our method yields accurate optical spectra including both the weakly and strongly bound excitons, while its computational cost is extremely low, since only the head element of the KS response matrix and the static dielectric constant are needed.