Density functional approach to many-body effects in the optical response of atoms

The purpose of this work is to present a new method for calculating the optical response of finite electronic system which is accurate, computationally simple, and lends itself to a ready physical interpretation of the results. This work is concerned with the so-called many-body effects which render an independent particle calculation inappropriate for comparison with experimental photoabsorption and photoemission cross sections. Polarization effects are included which describe the response of the system to an external probe and self-energy effects, which describe the dynamics and decay of a single particle state. This work, which essentially reintroduces the residual Coulomb interactions among the electrons, is confined to atoms. The method is a time-dependent local density approximation (TDLDA) and represents a natural generalization of the usual local density approximation to the ground state properties of a many electron system. Using standard first-order time-dependent perturbation theory, a self-consistent mean field theory is derived for an effective field which replaces the external field in the dipole matrix elements of the Golden Rule for photoabsorption. This effective field includes a contribution from an induced classical Coulomb field as well as an induced exchange-correlation field. This work successfully demonstrates the applicability of time-dependent generalization of the local density approximation to the practical calculation of the photo-response of atoms. For the rare gases, barium, cerium and copper are obtained cross sections in quantitative agreement with recent experiments