Dear Yun Song and interested parties,

The possibility of a phonon test case in ZnO piqued my curiosity so I decided 
to have a go at it.  I find a very odd convergence pattern with these two 
pseudopotentials in this system--the total energy has a damped sinusoidal decay 
with increasing cutoff:
(selecting the maxima and minima at 10 Ry sampling)

E_cutoff (Ry)   E_total (Ry)
100             -338.741
160             -338.660
210             -338.675
290             -338.665
370             -338.668
400             -338.667

Figure here: 
https://wiki.alcf.anl.gov/wparker/images/b/b5/ZnO_ecut_convergence_lda_ncpp.png
Details here: 
https://wiki.alcf.anl.gov/wparker/index.php/Zinc_Oxide_Parameter_Convergence

I have never encountered this kind of behavior with norm-conserving 
pseudopotentials before.  At worst, I've seen little steps in an otherwise 
smooth convergence to a value.  The eigenvalues at the various k-points don't 
appear to have any ghost states that come and go with cutoff.  Has anyone 
observed this kind of oscillation in the total energy with increasing 
plane-wave cutoff before?  What gives rise to it?

--William

*********************************************************
  William D. Parker                 
  Computational Postdoctoral Fellow   fax: (630) 252-4798
  MSD-212, Rm. C-215
  Argonne National Laboratory
  9700 S. Cass Ave.
  Argonne, IL 60439
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