Spherical harmonic expansion of short-range screened Coulomb interactions

Spherical harmonic expansions of the screened Coulomb interaction kernel involving the complementary error function are required in various problems in atomic, molecular and solid state physics, like for the evaluation of Ewald-type lattice sums or for range-separated hybrid density functionals. A general analytical expression is derived for the kernel, which is non-separable in the radial variables. With the help of series expansions a separable approximate form is proposed, which is in close analogy with the conventional multipole expansion of the Coulomb kernel in spherical harmonics. The convergence behaviour of these expansions is studied and illustrated by the electrostatic potential of an elementary charge distribution formed by products of Slatertype atomic orbitals.