Approximations of the Green’s function in multiple scattering theory for crystalline systems

The multiple scattering theory (MST) is a Green’s function method that has been widely used in electronic structure calculations for crystalline disordered systems. The key object of the MST method is the scattering path matrix (SPM) that characterizes the Green’s function within a local solution representation. This paper studies various approximations of the SPM, under the condition that an appropriate reference is used. In particular, we justify the convergence of the SPM approximations with respect to the size of scattering region and the length of scattering path, which are the central numerical parameters to achieve a linear-scaling MST method. We present numerical experiments on several typical systems to support the theory.