Optical conductivity of metals from first principles

A computational method to obtain optical conductivities from first principles is presented. It exploits a relation between the conductivity and the complex dielectric function, which is constructed from the full electronic band structure within the random-phase approximation. In contrast to the Drude model, no empirical parameters are used. As interband transitions as well as local-field effects are properly included, the calculated spectra are valid over a wide frequency range. As an illustration I present quantitative results for selected simple metals, noble metals, and ferromagnetic transition metals. The implementation is based on the full-potential linearized augmented-plane-wave method.