Siesta: Recent developments and applications

Abstract

A review of the present status, recent enhancements, and applicability of the Siesta program is presented. Since its debut in the mid-1990s, Siesta's flexibility, efficiency, and free distribution have given advanced materials simulation capabilities to many groups worldwide. The core methodological scheme of Siesta combines finite-support pseudo-atomic orbitals as basis sets, norm-conserving pseudopotentials, and a real-space grid for the representation of charge density and potentials and the computation of their associated matrix elements. Here, we describe the more recent implementations on top of that core scheme, which include full spin-orbit interaction, non-repeated and multiple-contact ballistic electron transport, density functional theory (DFT)+U and hybrid functionals, time-dependent DFT, novel reduced-scaling solvers, density-functional perturbation theory, efficient van der Waals non-local density functionals, and enhanced molecular-dynamics options. In addition, a substantial effort has been made in enhancing interoperability and interfacing with other codes and utilities, such as wannier90 and the second-principles modeling it can be used for, an AiiDA plugin for workflow automatization, interface to Lua for steering Siesta runs, and various post-processing utilities. Siesta has also been engaged in the Electronic Structure Library effort from its inception, which has allowed the sharing of various low-level libraries, as well as data standards and support for them, particularly the PSeudopotential Markup Language definition and library for transferable pseudopotentials, and the interface to the ELectronic Structure Infrastructure library of solvers. Code sharing is made easier by the new open-source licensing model of the program. This review also presents examples of application of the capabilities of the code, as well as a view of on-going and future developments. ; SIESTA development has been historically supported by different Spanish National Plan projects: MEC-DGESPB95-0202, MCyT-BFM2000-1312, MEC-BFM2003-03372,FIS2006-12117, FIS2009-12721, FIS2012-37549, FIS2015- 64886-P, and RTC-2016-5681-7, the latter one together with Simune Atomistics Ltd. Currently, we thank financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the grant No. PGC2018-096955-B. We acknowledge the Severo Ochoa Centers of Excellence Program under Grants No. SEV-2015-0496 (ICMAB), and SEV-2017-0706 (ICN2), the GenCat Grant No.2017SGR1506, and the European Union MaX Center of Excellence (EU-H2020 Grant No. 824143). P.G.-F. acknowledges support from Ramón y Cajal Grant No. RyC-2013-12515. J.I.C acknowledges RTI2018-097895-B-C41. R.C. acknowledges to the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodoswka–Curie grant agreement no. 665919. D.S.P, P.K, and P.B acknowledge MAT2016-78293-C6, FET-Open No. 863098, and UPV-EHU Grant IT1246-19. V. Yu was supported by a MolSSI fellowship (U.S. NSF award 1547580), and the ELSI development (V.B.,V.Yu) by NSF award 1450280. We also acknowledge Honghui Shang and Xinming Qin for giving us access to the HONPAS code, where a preliminary version of the hybrid functionals support described here was implemented. We are indebted to other contributors to the SIESTA project, whose names can be seen in the file in the Docs/Contributors.txt file of the SIESTA distribution, and we thank those, too many to list, contributing fixes, comments, clarifications, and documentation for the code. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)