Ab initio calculations of optical absorption spectra: solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation within density matrix perturbation theory.

We describe an ab initio approach to compute the optical absorption spectra of molecules and solids, which is suitable for the study of large systems and gives access to spectra within a wide energy range. In this approach, the quantum Liouville equation is solved iteratively within first order perturbation theory, with a Hamiltonian containing a static self-energy operator. This procedure is equivalent to solving the statically screened Bethe-Salpeter equation. Explicit calculations of single particle excited states and inversion of dielectric matrices are avoided using techniques based on density functional perturbation theory. In this way, full absorption spectra may be obtained with a computational workload comparable to ground state Hartree-Fock calculations. We present results for small molecules, for the spectra of a 1 nm Si cluster in a wide energy range (20 eV), and for a dipeptide exhibiting charge transfer excitations.