Dear Lily,

the best approach is to check convergence of your property of interest with 
mesh-cutoff,
which often is better (at smaller cutoff) than the convergence of total energy. 
The reason is systematic error cancellation.

However, as "early warning indicator" I keep an eye on the line " Tot " at the 
end of the "atomic forces (eV/Ang)" listing in the output file.  The sum of all 
forces should be zero.  If this is not the case, the fores suffer from 
numerical problems often related to a small mesh-cutoff (e.g. eggbox effect).  
In these cases geometry optimization also becomes difficult (takes very many 
cycles with little change in energy and geometry).

Regards, Ulrich.

----- Original Message -----
From: lily zheng
[mailto:[email protected]]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tue, 09 Aug 2011
22:52:44 +0200
Subject: [SIESTA-L] question about meshcutoff


> Dear All,
> 
> Just got a question about meshcutoff.   For the general case, if we use too
> small meshcutoff,  what output would become strange or any signs which
> indicates that the meshcutoff used  is too small?
> 
> 
> thanks
> 
> Lily
> 

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