Dear team,

I am having a problem reproducing the lattice constant of Vanadium as
reported in the paper:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qua.10402/abstract

I followed the recipe in the paper to create the PS file: for s, p, d
orbitals, setting the core radii to be 2.35, 2.7, 2.35. Then we set the
non-linear core correction radius to 0.8. Below is the ATOM input file I
created for that:
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   pe
        tm2
    V   pbs
     0.000     0.000     0.000     0.000     0.000     0.000
    5    4
    4    0     2.000     0.000    #4s
    4    1     0.000     0.000    #4p
    3    2     3.000     0.000    #3d
    4    3     0.000     0.000    #4f
   2.35000   2.70000   2.35000   2.50000   1.00000  0.80000
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, my problem is: the authors of the above paper say that the lattice
constant of bulk vanadium, according to SIESTA calculations that they have
performed, is 3.02 Ang. However, using the PS file generated from the above
input file, I get wrong lattice constants! If I run using pbs (PBE with
spin), the lattice constant is close to 3.25 Ang. If I run with pb (PBE
without spin), the lattice constant is close to 2.5 Ang!

The way I calculate the lattice constant: I vary the lattice constant and
compute the total energy in a single DFT run, then plot the energies versus
the lattice constant.

Can anyone help?

Sherif

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