Materials where electrons show nearly localized rather than itinerant behaviour, such as the high-temperature superconducting copper oxides, or manganate oxides, are attracting interest due to their physical properties and potential applications. For these materials, the interaction between electrons, or electron correlation, plays an important role in describing their electronic strucuture, and the standard methods for the calculation of their electronic spectra based on the local density approximation (LDA) breakdown. This is the first attempt to describe recent approaches that go beyond the concept of the LDA, to successfully describe the electronic structure of narrow-band materials.

Materials where electrons show nearly localized rather than itinerant behaviour, such as the high-temperature superconducting copper oxides, or manganate oxides, are attracting tremendous interest due to their interesting physical properties and potential applications. For these materials, the interaction between electrons, or electron correlation, plays an important role in describing their electronic structure, and the standard methods for the calculation of their electronic spectra based on the local density approximation (LDA) breakdown. This book is an attempt to describe the electronic structure of narrow-band materials. It provides a comprehensive introduction to the methods of LDA+U, the GW approximation, the local spin density approximation, the self-interaction correction approximation, and the optimized effective potential method, and should be a useful source for graduate students and researchers working in all aspects of solid state physics.