negative phonon frequency

Phonons, DFPT, electron-phonon, electric-field response, mechanical response…

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christian.bohley
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Feb 18, 2010 10:01 am

negative phonon frequency

Post by christian.bohley » Tue Feb 23, 2010 10:07 am

Hi, I try to calculate phonon frequencies of the cubic phase of BaF2. all seems to be ok, but for the phonon wavevector .25 .25 0 the two lower bands give negative phononfrequencies of around -350 cm-1. I don't understand why. Can anybody help me? The input file is attached. Thanks in advance, christian.
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BaF2.in
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mverstra
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Aug 19, 2009 12:01 pm

Re: negative phonon frequency

Post by mverstra » Wed Feb 24, 2010 1:49 pm

This is probably not acoustic sum rule breaking, for once, so either the phase is genuinely unstable (ok, that won't really be the case) or you are not converged wrt some parameter...

Try doing just the soft phonon with even higher ecut/nkpt/nband. Btw, have you looked at the phonon scf convergence, to make sure it was ok? Which pseudopotentials are you using?

Matthieu
Matthieu Verstraete
University of Liege, Belgium

christian.bohley
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Feb 18, 2010 10:01 am

Re: negative phonon frequency

Post by christian.bohley » Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:20 am

Thank you very much. I used for Ba the LDA Teter extended norm-conserving psp and for F the Troullier-Martins. Other pseudopotentials gave single negative phonon frequencies, too. What do you mean with "phonon scf convergence"? I checked the other convergences but the results did not change significantly. It is worthy to try a much higher value for nband than 12 in this case? greetings, christian

mverstra
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Aug 19, 2009 12:01 pm

Re: negative phonon frequency

Post by mverstra » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:52 am

By phonon convergence I meant the D2ETOT convergence of ETOT - check the log.
Matthieu Verstraete
University of Liege, Belgium

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