  Density functionals with asymptotic corrections to the long-range potential
are recognized as entry-level methods for electronic structure calculations on
molecules that can sustain charge transfer. Even though charge transfer is also
extremely common in Materials-Science, the application of such methods has been
rare. We implement CAM-B3LYP within the VASP framework. Results obtained for 8
representative materials: aluminum, diamond, graphene, silicon, NaCl, MgO, 2D
h-BN and 3D h-BN, indicate that CAM-B3LYP predictions embody mean-absolute
deviations (MAD) compared to HSE06 that are reduced by a factor of 4 for
lattice parameters, 4 for quasiparticle band gaps, 3 for the lowest optical
excitation energies, and 6 for exciton binding energies; the only property for
which HSE06 performed better was the band-gap of silicon. CAM-B3LYP also
appears to provide similar or improved accuracy compared to ab initio G0W0 and
Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) approaches. The CAM-B3LYP implementation in VASP
was verified by comparison of optimized geometries and reaction energies for
isolated molecules taken from the ACCDB database, evaluated in large periodic
unit cells, to analogous results obtained using Gaussian-basis sets by
Gaussian-16. Using standard GW pseudopotentials and energy cutoffs for the
plane-wave calculations and the aug-cc-pV5Z basis set for the atomic-basis
ones, the MAD in energy for 1738 chemical reactions was 0.34 kcal mol-1 (0.015
eV), whilst for 1291 bond lengths this was 0.0036 {\AA}. An approximate scheme
for the speedy implementation of CAM-B3LYP into other electronic-structure
codes for materials-science applications was considered and shown to be less
accurate, but nevertheless useful. Analytical functional derivatives for
CAM-B3LYP were also obtained and implemented, ca. halving computational cost
compared to use of standard numerical derivatives.
