  Kohn-Sham density functional theory is in principle an exact formulation of
quantum mechanical electronic structure theory, but in practice we have to rely
on approximate exchange-correlation (xc) functionals. The objective of our work
has been to design an xc functional with broad accuracy across as wide an
expanse of chemistry and physics as possible, leading-as a long-range goal-to a
functional with good accuracy for all problems, i.e., a universal functional.
To guide our path toward that goal and to measure our progress, we have
developed-building on earlier work in our group-a set of databases of reference
data for a variety of energetic and structural properties in chemistry and
physics. These databases include energies of molecular processes such as
atomization, complexation, proton addition, and ionization; they also include
molecular geometries and solid-state lattice constants, chemical reaction
barrier heights, and cohesive energies and band gaps of solids. For the present
paper we gather many of these databases into four comprehensive databases, two
with 384 energetic data for chemistry and solid-state physics and another two
with 68 structural data for chemistry and solid-state physics, and we test 2
wave function methods and 77 density functionals (12 Minnesota meta functionals
and 65 others) in a consistent way across this same broad set of data. We
especially highlight the Minnesota density functionals, but the results have
broader implications in that one may see the successes and failures of many
kinds of density functionals when they are all applied to the same data.
Therefore the results provide a status report on the quest for a universal
functional.
