Functional renormalization group and Kohn–Sham scheme in density functional theory

Abstract Deriving accurate energy density functional is one of the central problems in condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and quantum chemistry. We propose a novel method to deduce the energy density functional by combining the idea of the functional renormalization group and the Kohn–Sham scheme in density functional theory. The key idea is to solve the renormalization group flow for the effective action decomposed into the mean-field part and the correlation part. Also, we propose a simple practical method to quantify the uncertainty associated with the truncation of the correlation part. By taking the φ 4 theory in zero dimension as a benchmark, we demonstrate that our method shows extremely fast convergence to the exact result even for the highly strong coupling regime.