Progress at the interface of wave-function and density-functional theories

The Kohn-Sham (KS) potential of density-functional theory (DFT) emerges as the minimizing effective potential in a variational scheme that does not involve fixing the unknown single-electron density. Using Rayleigh Schroedinger (RS) perturbation theory (PT), we construct ab initio approximations for the energy difference, the minimization of which determines the KS potential directly - thereby bypassing DFT's traditional algorithm to search for the density that minimizes the total energy. From second-order RS PT, we obtain variationally stable energy differences to be minimized, solving the severe problem of variational collapse of orbital-dependent exchange-correlation functionals based on second-order RS PT.