Recent advances and perspectives in four-component Dirac-Kohn-Sham calculations

We review recent theoretical and computational advances in the full relativistic four-component Dirac–Kohn–Sham (DKS) approach and its application to the calculation of the electronic structure of chemical systems containing many heavy atoms. We describe our implementation of an all-electron DKS approach based on the use of G-spinor basis sets, Hermite Gaussian functions, state-of-the-art density-fitting techniques and memory distributed parallelism. This approach has enormously extended the applicability of the DKS method, including for example large clusters of heavy atoms, and opens the way for future key developments. We examine the current limitations and future possible applications of the DKS approach, including the implementation of four-current density functionals and real-time propagation schemes. This would make possible to describe molecules in strong fields, accurately accounting for relativistic kinematic effects and spin–orbit coupling.