Physical exact conditions as regularizers for exchange-correlation in solids and surface chemistry

Density functional theory (DFT) often is the method of choice for simulating the electronic properties of extended solids and surfaces from first principles due to a favorable compromise between accuracy and computational cost.

In the field of heterogeneous catalysis, DFT is indispensable for deriving mechanistic insights and understanding trends in surface reactivity.

The accuracy of DFT for surface reaction energetics depends strongly on the exchange-correlation (XC) approximation.

We show here that optimization of such XC functionals for surface binding energies can lead to a worse description of surface reaction barriers, unless important physical exact conditions are fulfilled.