On Mar 25, 2010, at 4:16 PM, Jiayu Dai wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I found in the previous discussion that the energy in PWscf using Fermi-Dirac 
> smearing is the free energy.

It is *NOT* any free energy of any physical system. It can be interpreted as 
the free energy of a system of electrons in the field of clamped nuclei, at the 
*fictitious* temperature corresponding to the smearing you use. The reason why 
this concept is useful is that the free energy is variational, while the 
internal energy is not. That's why Hellman-Feynman forces are derivatives of 
the free energy, but not of the internal energy.

> Is it the total free energy including electrons and ions contribution?

As said, electrons only.

> Furthermore, how to get the internal energy here? The kinetic energy is easy 
> to calculate, but how about the potential energy?

You do not need any internal energy. what you may actually want to estimate is 
the T->0 extrapolation of both the free and internal energies (which coincide 
in the T->0 limit). I think that some estimate of this are available in the pw 
output, but others may know more than me about this.

Stefano B

> 
> Thanks a lot.
> 
> Jiayu
> ----------------
> -------------------------------------------
> Jiayu Dai
> Department of Physics
> National University of Defense Technology, 
> Changsha, 410073, P R China
> -----------------------------------------
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---
Stefano Baroni - SISSA  &  DEMOCRITOS National Simulation Center - Trieste
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(skype)

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