Various points about CASTEP & relaxation. MJR 10/96 Efficiency ---------- CASTEP uses a combined ion-electron conjugate gradients method, due to Mike Payne et al. This is not necessarily optimal. For complex problems, the use of BFGS (implimented on CETEP) is _much_ faster. See thesis, R. Shah. Unit cell relaxation -------------------- Not done by academic code. Done by MSI's commercial code. Need to relax at constant cut-off with Francis-Payne correction to energy and stress. Symmetry -------- If symmetry is imposed it cannot be broken. If symmetry is not imposed, it might be broken due to numeric noise, but only after many iterations. Therefore, do not start with a configuration of higher symmetry than the expected relaxed configuration. Number of k-points ------------------ Relaxation writes information to fort.40 and higher. K-point files start at fort.20. Hence no more than 20 k-points can be used. Enabling -------- Set RMOVE in fort.15 to 1.0 for those ions which are to move, 0.0 for those which are fixed. Set IION to 1 in fort.14 Beware: the total number of electronic steps will be NITER*NITFIX, and with IPRINT=0 there will be no output except on steps which involve ionic relaxation. Even with IPRINT=1 the total energy is printed out only on ionic relaxation, when it is printed _thrice_. Even if IION=0, this is still true, except that the energy is printed once per NITFIX iterations.