New Theoretical Support for Density-Functional Theory as Commonly Applied

The Kohn-Sham equations are derived from the diagrammatic structure of many-body perturbation theory for the exact exchange-correlation energy, Eₗ₂, without explicit recourse to a minimum or extremal principle, thus providing new support for this implementation of density-functional theory in a most common situation. Furthermore, it is shown that for a large class of approximate expressions for Eₗ₂, there exist approximate Kohn-Sham equations which give the same density and energy as other means of calculation within the same diagrammatic approximation.