A bird's-eye view of density-functional theory

This paper is the outgrowth of lectures the author gave at the Physics Institute and the Chemistry Institute of the University of São Paulo at São Carlos, Brazil, and at the VIII'th Summer School on Electronic Structure of the Brazilian Physical Society. It is an attempt to introduce density-functional theory (DFT) in a language accessible for students entering the field or researchers from other fields. It is not meant to be a scholarly review of DFT, but rather an informal guide to its conceptual basis and some recent developments and advances. The Hohenberg-Kohn theorem and the Kohn-Sham ...