Empirical band-gap correction for LDA-derived atomic effective pseudopotentials

Atomic effective pseudopotentials enable atomistic calculations at the level of accuracy of density functional theory for semiconductor nanostructures with up to fifty thousand atoms. Since they are directly derived from ab-initio calculations performed in the local density approximation (LDA), they inherit the typical underestimated band gaps and effective masses. We propose an empirical correction based on the modification of the non-local part of the pseudopotential and demonstrate good performance for bulk binary materials (InP, ZnS, HgTe, GaAs) and quantum dots (InP, CdSe, GaAs) with diameters ranging from 1.0 nm to 4.45 nm. Additionally, we provide a simple analytic expression to obtain accurate quasiparticle and optical band gaps for InP, CdSe, and GaAs QDs, from standard LDA calculations.