[gpaw-users] Questions on EquationofStates in pw mode

[jun yan]

Dear gpaw users/developers, 

     Please excuse me if my following question is stupid:
     When one performs the EOS in pw mode, the number of plane waves are forced to be the same with different volumes of cells (let's say the lattice parameters are scaled from 0.95 to 1.05) by using the command PW(ecut, cell=cell_at_scale_1.0). Using this way, the EOS fitting curve looks perfect. It however means that, with increasing cell volume, the effective plane wave cutoff energy is decreasing since the number of plane waves is fixed. In my calculations, the decreasing of plane wave cutoff energy results in increasing of the total energy. The consequence is thus the lattice parameters shift to smaller values using fixed number of plane waves compared to using fixed plane wave cutoff energy. My question is, which one is physically meaningful : fixing the number of plane waves or the effective plane wave energy cutoff ? I will think its the latter. However, the EOS based on using the same plane wave cutoff energy looks much worse than fixing the number of plane waves. I appreciate if anyone has any insights on this. Thanks ! 

All the best, 
Jun