Dear Pascal

Please, have a look to these couple of papers:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0953-8984/24/20/205503
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2013.02.020

They point to that Tran-Blaha modification to the Becke-Johnson metaGGA 
functional may yield quite good bandgaps for insulators (comparable to hybrid 
functionals) at a much reduced computational cost. The price to pay is that 
convergence is so tricky, even for simple binary compounds. I am giving them a 
chance to see if they deserve to be used instead of hybrid functionals.

Thanks for your comments

Juanjo



From: Pascal BOULET
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 3:17 PM
To: PWSCF Forum
Subject: Re: [Pw_forum] TB09 metaGGA

Dear Juanjo,

As far as I know, metaGGAs are like GGAs for gaps: there are not accurate. For 
getting good gaps you have to switch to hybrid functionals or GW formalism (not 
implemented in QE though). Depending on what you want to do, of course, and if 
you know the gap value you may try this: optimize with a standard GGA 
functional, run a nscf calculation and if the gap is not totally closed up then 
operate a rigid band shifting for further properties calculations. This is a 
bit brute force...

If you do not know the gap value: run a hybrid single point calculation on the 
GGA optimized structure.

As Yves said, there are not so many options...

Pascal



"Juanjo Meléndez" <[email protected]> wrote:
  Dear Yves

  Thanks a lot for your comments. Unfortunately, I need a good description of 
gaps to calculate optical absorption, and hybrid functionals are prohibitive 
for the supercells that I need to use. That is why I started to try with 
metaGGA.

  I will have a look to the paper you mention (which I did not know, by the 
way, thanks!) for more ideas...

  Take care

  Juanjo

  From: Yves Ferro
  Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 10:20 AM
  To: PWSCF Forum
  Subject: Re: [Pw_forum] TB09 metaGGA

  Dear Juanjo,

  From what I can remember:
  - the meta-GGA kinetic terms are not saved in order to restart a nscf, at 
least up to the 5.0 version,
  - the tools for building meta-GGA PPs are not available in QE.
  However, I'm not sure using meta-GGA pseudos will solve your problem. 
Meta-GGA are known to have numerical instabilities such as the ones you met, in 
particular when then electronic density drop to a very low level as probably in 
your ionic crystal LiF, on the contrary with Si and C that form covalent 
structures.


  You can have a look to this paper you probably know:
  E.R. Johnson, JCP 131, 034111 2009


  I don't believe a cure to you problem exists at the moment, except by 
changing the functional to a GGA one.


  Best regards,


  Yves
  .




  Le 31 oct. 2014 à 09:26, Juanjo Meléndez a écrit :


    Hi Pascal

    Thanks for replying. I agree with you that building a PP consistent with 
the metaGGA functional would solve most of the instability problems. But I do 
not have *any* experience building PPs (which, by the way, seems to be not 
trivial to me, even less trivial for metaGGA), so I followed 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2013.02.020 and tried the trick. I was just 
wondering if any general strategy for convergence exists.

    Regarding point 2, I asked one of the authors of the aforementioned paper 
and he declared not the have seen such a problem before, so I guess that the 
kinetic terms are not responsible. I have overcome the problem by using a dense 
kpoints path already in scf calculations and calculating the bands without the 
standard intermediate nscf run, but it would be nice if the developers could 
have a look and check.

    Again, thank you very much for your interest.

    Juanjo

    Juan J. Meléndez
    Associate Professor
    Department of Physics · University of Extremadura
    Avda. de Elvas, s/n 06006 Badajoz (Spain)
    Phone: +34 924 28 96 55
    Fax: +34 924 28 96 51
    Email: [email protected]
    Web: http://materiales.unex.es/miembros/personal/jj-melendez/Index.html

    From: Pascal BOULET
    Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2014 7:15 PM
    To: PWSCF Forum
    Subject: Re: [Pw_forum] TB09 metaGGA

    hello,

    I have never tried meta-GGA functionals with QE, so I am guessing.

    For point 1, one possible reason is the inadequacy between the pseudo 
potential and the functional. I guess you have build a special pseudopotential 
for this functional.

    Point 2: Could it be because the meta-GGA kinetic terms are not saved in 
the checkpoint file and hence not readable when doing the nscf?


    Pascal


    "Juanjo Meléndez" <[email protected]> wrote:
      Hi all

      I am starting to work with metaGGA functionals in QE (v. 5.1 + libXc), 
following Èric Germaneau and colleagues’ work 
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2013.02.020). I know that metaGGA is little 
tested, but I would be pleased if somebody could answer a couple of questions:

      1) Convergence is quite tricky. Up to know, I got some results in simple 
systems using a very small mixing_beta (within 0.01–0.05), not too many bands 
(just one or two conduction bands, never converged for more bands) and 
restarting from a previously fully converged calculation. I got results only 
for carbon, silicon and germanium, never got any convergence for any binary 
simple compound (like LiF). Does anyone have additional hints for metaGGA 
calculations to converge?

      2) In addition, I get something wrong with nscf calculations. After 
convergence of a scf run, I get a list of bands at each k-point, as usual 
–nothing strange here. Then I made a path of k-points to get the band structure 
and run a nscf calculation. This finishes fine as well, but the bands are not 
only different from those from the scf calculations, but also unrealistically 
high. I am attaching the input and output files for both the scf and nscf runs, 
as well as a couple of eigenval.xml files taken after nscf. Does anybody know 
how to manage this? Or could this be a bug in the code?

      Thanks a lot in advance

      Take care

      Juanjo

      Juan J. Meléndez
      Associate Professor
      Department of Physics · University of Extremadura
      Avda. de Elvas, s/n 06006 Badajoz (Spain)
      Phone: +34 924 28 96 55
      Fax: +34 924 28 96 51
      Email: [email protected]
      Web: http://materiales.unex.es/miembros/personal/jj-melendez/Index.html

      ****************************
      “All those who look stupid actually are, as also are half of those who do 
not look like” (F. de Quevedo)

      ****************************



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    Email: [email protected]
    Tel. +33 413 55 18 10
    Fax +33 413 55 18 50




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Avenue Normandie-Niemen
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Email: [email protected]
Tel. +33 413 55 18 10
Fax +33 413 55 18 50




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