Tag Archives: Quantum Espresso

IR and Raman spectra calculated with Quantum Espresso

Infrared (IR) and Raman spectra are two very valuable tools for the characterization of chemical compounds. And although there seem to be many different possibilities to produce them computationally, I didn’t find any clear tutorial on how to produce them using free software tools. Some of them, give complicated instructions on how to calculate second derivatives or Raman tensors, or stuff like that, but in the end one wonders: Where are the numbers I have to plot!

…Thereby, here is my post about computing IR and Raman spectra with Quantum Espresso.

For the impatient: most of this post is resumed in my Quantum Espresso example for the PHonon code, which will run for some 15-17 minutes and pop-up the IR/Raman spectra of CO2 and ZnO (Wurtzite).

Continue reading →

Checking the optimum cutoff for QE

Rise your hand if you have ever gotten a pseudo-potential from somewhere and you started to use it just by checking the recommended values of the cutoffs inside the file.

Are we sure these values are good?
If you are an skeptic scientist and you do not thrust what you don’t do by yourself, now there is a really simple and cheap way for you to test for the optimum cutoff of any pseudopotential with Quantum Espresso: my pw_cutoff checking script.

The ecutwfc is described in the manual as the kinetic energy cutoff for wave functions in Ry. Continue reading →

pw2cellvec: monitor vc-relax convergence in QE

When running a cell relaxation, it is sometimes nice to monitor what is going on with the cell parameters. If you run the cell relaxation with Quantum Espresso, you can use my python script “pw2cellvec” to parse all the information you need.

So, first of all, run a “vc-relax” calcuculation with a large (about 2 times bigger) cutoff for both wavefunction (ecutwfc) and charge (ecutrho) and wait for a couple of iterations. These calculations are very expensive, due to the large cutoffs.

Then, just run the script and you will get something like this:

user> pw2cellvec.py -o pwout
- -
AA a= 6.02104498011 b= 6.02109150665 c= 9.45688483193 Vol.= 296.919819153
au a= 11.3781260524 b= 11.3782139748 c= 17.8709224124 c/a= 1.57063846279
alpha= 89.9989981833 beta= 90.0012313781 gamma= 119.99694776
- - Continue reading →

sum_states.py: Nice DOS plots from QE outputs

Once, I was making some DOS figures with quantum espresso by using the sumpdos.x program by Andrea Ferretti (included in the QE package), but I felt that I am missing some features. Thereby, I wrote my own script, which does something similar, but it is much more automatized, it is faster to use, and it even produces ready-to-publish graphs automatically.

It is part of the quantum espresso distribution, so if you have the source code of quantum espresso, you have it in the …/*espresso*/PP/tools/sum_states.py. If you don’t have it, or you just want to read the source-code online, you can check for sum_states.py in the quantum espresso repository. Continue reading →