Adding Temperature to the Adiabatic Connection: Hybrid Functionals for Static and Dynamic Correlation
This work extends density functional theory by adding a temperature dimension to capture both static and dynamic electron correlation simultaneously. It introduces 'thermally enhanced hybrid functionals' that use an effective 'correlation temperature' within thermal Hartree-Fock to model static correlation, while standard DFT handles dynamic correlation. The framework unifies i-DMFT and TAO-DFT, providing a systematic route for low-cost treatment of both types of electron correlation.