Multipole splats for optimized and inverted effective potentials

Abstract

In modern density functional theory, effective Hamiltonians are constructed to reproduce densities and forces of electrons at equilibrium. However, their nonlocal potentials leave systematic errors in spectral properties and real-time dynamics. Access to local optimized or inverted effective potentials would remove this limitation, but the numerical fragility in finite orbital bases has long prevented their wide adoption. Here, we introduce multipole splats, a class of trial potentials that carry the correct asymptotic decay required to support the unoccupied spectrum. By connecting the computation of effective potentials to variational and supervised variants of Hamiltonian learning, we recast both problems as stable nonlinear optimization formulated directly in standard orbital basis sets and applicable to any hybrid functional approximation. The resulting solver allows us to resolve spatial profiles of exchange-correlation potential errors during molecular dissociation and accurately reconstruct key excited states without empirical asymptotic corrections. We also show the deviation from the ionization potential theorem for different exchange-correlation approximations on a dataset of molecular systems. Multipole splats extract insights from established approximations and provide capacity for robust dataset generation for downstream processing and learning.