Hello QE community,

Some time ago, I was attempting to use the -pw2casino flag to deconstruct the 
total energy in terms of its physical contributions, such as its kinetic energy 
term, etc (see 
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg35391.html for 
my previous post).


I've succeeded when using ultrasoft pseudopotentials, but I now have some 
further questions related to the output from the -pw2casino SCF option. I 
attempted to find some answers online, but was unable to find documentation or 
forum discussions, and I was also unable to figure out what was being 
implemented in the pw2casino.f90 and pw2casino_write.f90 codes I found on 
github...


Anyways, my questions mainly have to deal with the physical interpretations of 
the deconstructed energy values.


When using the pw2casino flag, the contributions given to us are:

 - Kinetic energy
 - Local energy
 - Non-Local energy
 - Ewald energy
 - xc contribution
 - hartree energy


Now from my understanding of KS density functional theory, the total energy is 
comprised of the following:

-Kinetic energy (itinerancy of electrons in their KS orbitals)

-Hartree energy (the classical Coulomb interaction between electrons)

-Ewald energy (the classical Coulomb interaction between nuclei)

-External energy (the classical Coulomb interaction between the electron 
density and the nuclei)

-XC energy (everything else i.e. exchange, correlation, and a bit of kinetic 
energy error from taking the KS ansatz)


Furthermore, from a DFT approach that uses PAW pseudopotentials, I know that we 
have to map between all-electron and pseudo expectation values, so that we make 
a distinction between pseudoenergies and the more physical all-electron 
energies (see here for more information 
https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.50.17953). Now the PAW 
formalisms and approach are generalizable to other pseudopotential methods, so 
I assume that we deal with the same kind of all-electron vs pseudo distinction 
when using ultrasoft pseudopotentials.



Now that I've laid out the basic prerequisite knowledge I currently have, my 
questions about the pw2casino energy deconstruction are as follows:

1) The output of the total energy is understood to be the pseudoenergy (i.e. 
the energy of the system in the pseudospace of ultrasoft potentials where the 
hard nuclear potentials are being weakened by the core electrons). Am I correct 
in assuming the deconstructed contributions are pseudoenergies well? Because 
they sum up to the total pseudoenergy that is output.
2) As a continuation off of 1), does this mean that the Kinetic Energy produced 
using the pw2casino flag only sums over the valence states  (since our core 
electrons are approximately frozen out in this pseudopotential approach)?
3) What are the physical meanings behind the "Local energy" and "Non-local 
energy" values that are being output by pw2casino? If we compare my list of 
contributions to the list produced by pw2casino, it seems as if these two 
energy contributions are connected to the External energy i.e. the energy 
between electron and nuclei. If this is correct, and in light of our 
pseudopotential approach, does this mean that the "Local energy" corresponds to 
that of the core electrons while the "Non-local" energy are for the valence 
electrons?
4) Question 3) was asked assuming that the output from pw2casino for the 
kinetic, ewald, XC, and hartree contributions are in line with my understanding 
of the energy contributions. Am I missing anything in this respect, or do they 
all match up?

If anyone can answer any of my questions or offer any further insight into the 
physical meaning behind these energy values or how they are calculated, it 
would be very much appreciated.

And if this is helpful for anyone, I am using PWSCF v.5.0.2 and the following 
pseudopotentials for MgO:
- Mg.pbe-spnl-rrkjus_psl.1.0.0.UPF
- O.pbe-nl-rrkjus_psl.1.0.0.UPF

Thank you,
Wai-Ga David Ho, Dept of Physics at Florida State University and NHMFL

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