Highly accurate prediction of material optical properties based on density functional theory

Theoretical material investigation based on density functional theory (DFT) has been a breakthrough in the last century. Nevertheless, the optical properties calculated by DFT generally show poor agreement with experimental results particularly when the absorption-coefficient (alpha) spectra in logarithmic scale are compared. In this study, we have established an alternative DFT approach (PHS method) that calculates highly accurate alpha spectra, which show remarkable agreement with experimental spectra even in logarithmic scale. In the developed method, the optical function estimated from generalized gradient approximation (GGA) using very high-density k mesh is blue-shifted by incorporating the energy-scale correction by a hybrid functional and the amplitude correction by sum rule. Our simple approach enables high-precision prediction of the experimental alpha spectra of all solar-cell materials (GaAs, InP, CdTe, CuInSe2 and Cu2ZnGeSe4) investigated here. The developed method satisfies the requirements of high accuracy and low computational cost simultaneously and is superior to conventional GGA, hybrid functional and GW methods.