Hello Eugene,
40 cm^-1 makes approximately 1.2 THz. Usually my frequencies at Gamma in the abinit output are around 0.5 or 0.6 so it's the same order of magnitude. But you should have the first three modes nearly degenerate in frequencies so my guess would be that something went probably wrong.
I have two more advices for DFPT users :
1. At the end of the DFPT run, for each qpoint, you have the fourteen components of the derivative of the total energy (just grep 'Fourteen'). At the end of this section, you have the value of the 2nd derivative of the total energy "2DETotal = XXXX Ha" then, two lines below, you have the same 2nd derivative of the total energy calculated in a non-variational way "non-var 2DETotal = XXXX Ha".
These two values must be close!! Usually in my calculations, the difference between the two values is lower than 10^-5 Ha. Sometimes, in very complex systems (actinides, no symmetries, defects, etc.), I have a difference of ~10^-2 Ha. If the difference is larger than that,
then your calculation is wrong. If it happens, you may first want to check the convergence of your ground state wave functions (tolwfr at least 10^-20). Usually it solves the problem.
2. The other important point is that the kpoint grid needs to satisfy the space group symmetry. However, when it does not, abinit doesn't say anything, the calculation runs smoothly but the results are wrong. The indication for this "bug" is that the acoustic sum rule is absolutely not satisfied (which I believe is the main subject of this topic
). In order to solve this issue there is a little bypass that I found and that you should use while we are correcting the issue: just use rfstrs=3 in your calculation at the Gamma q point. If the kpoint grid does not fully respect the space group symmetry, then in this case abinit will stop and will display an error message saying that the kpoint grid must be changed. Just change your kpoint grid so that it satisfies this rule. And always use rfstrs=3 in order to be sure that you have the correct k point grid.
If your calculations follow these two points, you should have better phonon spectra
As for the GGA implementation, the development will start very soon!