Reduction of Electronic Wavefunctions to Kohn-Sham Effective Potentials

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A method for calculating the Kohn--Sham exchange-correlation potential, vₓC(r), from a given electronic wavefunction is devised and implemented. It requires on input one- and two-electron density matrices and involves construction of the generalized Fock matrix. The method is free from numerical limitations and basis-set artifacts of conventional schemes for constructing vₓC(r) in which the potential is recovered from a given electron density, and is simpler than various many-body techniques. The chief significance of this development is that it allows one to directly probe the functional derivative of the true exchange-correlation energy functional and to rigorously test and improve various density-functional approximations.