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GSintroduction

This page gives hints on how to build an input file for a ground state calculation with the ABINIT package.

Introduction

The computation of the ground state energy of an assembly of nuclei and electrons placed in a repeated cell can be done using (1) plane waves and norm-conserving pseudopotentials, or, (2) so-called “Projector-Augmented Waves” (PAW method), with appropriate pseudoatomic data, or (3) wavelets. The wavelet framework is described here.

In the plane wave framework, the program admits many different types of pseudopotentials. There are several complete sets of norm-conserving pseudopotentials available for most elements of the periodic table.

The recommended tables (GGA-PBE, GGA-PBEsol and LDA) come from the pseudo-dojo project with ONCVPSP pseudopotentials ([Hamann2013]) both in scalar-relativistic format and fully-relativistic version with spin-orbit coupling. For PAW calculation,the recommended one (GGA-PBE and LDA) is the JTH table in the PAW XML format (([cite:Jollet2014]]).

The choice between norm-conserving pseudopotentials or PAW is deduced automatically by the choice of the pseudopotential in the “files” file. An input file must specify the following items:

No variable associated to this topic.

Selected Input Files

No input file associated to this topic.

Tutorials

  • The tutorial 1 deals with the H2 molecule: get the total energy, the electronic energies, the charge density, the bond length, the atomisation energy
  • The tutorial 2 deals again with the H2 molecule: convergence studies, LDA versus GGA
  • The tutorial 3 deals with crystalline silicon (an insulator): the definition of a k-point grid, the smearing of the cut-off energy, the computation of a band structure, and again, convergence studies …
  • The tutorial 4] deals with crystalline aluminum (a metal), and its surface: occupation numbers, smearing the Fermi-Dirac distribution, the surface energy, and again, convergence studies …