Rehabilitation of the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof generalized gradient approximation for layered materials

The structural and energetic properties of layered materials propose a challenge to density functional theory with common semilocal approximations to the exchange-correlation. By combining the most-widely used semilocal generalized gradient approximation (GGA), Perdew--Burke--Ernzerhof (PBE), with the revised Vydrov--Van Voorhis non-local correlation functional (rVV10), both excellent structural and energetic properties of 28 layered materials were recovered with a judicious parameter selection. We term the resulting functional as PBE+rVV10L with "L" denoting for layered materials. Such combination is not new, and involves only refitting a single global parameter, however the resulting excellency suggests such corrected PBE for many aspects of theoretical studies on layered materials. For comparison, we also present the results for PBE+rVV10 where the parameter is determined by the 22 interaction energies between molecules.