Dear All,
Elk version 9.1.15 has just been released.
New features include the piezoelectric and magnetoelectric tensors. This are calculated using the Berry phase method of R. D. King-Smith and David Vanderbilt, Phys. Rev. B 47, 1651(R) (1993). See the examples in the elk/examples/piezoelectric and elk/examples/magnetoelectric directories for details.
We've also updated the code to enable exchange-correlation functionals with Laplacian terms. This is useful some types of meta-GGAs, including those which are 'de-orbitalised' using the method of D. Mejia-Rodriguez and S. B. Trickey, Phys. Rev. B 98, 115161 (2018). Partial de-orbitalisation has also been improved and now works with the complete range of kinetic energy density functionals in Libxc; see arXiv:2304.02363.
The change of large parts of the code to single-precision arithmetic has been completed. This includes Hartree-Fock, hybrid functionals, RDMFT, OEP, GW and the linear-response functions. All these methods are now considerably faster and more memory efficient as a result.
Finally, Elk has been recognized with a Community Leader Award by SourceForge; thanks to all the users and contributors for making the code as useful as it is, as well as for making the forums a congenial place for everyone.
Best wishes,
Kay Dewhurst, Sangeeta Sharma, Lars Nordström, Francesco Cricchio, Oscar Grånäs and Hardy Gross.
elk-9.1.15
-added piezoelectric and magnetoelectric tensors as tasks 380 and 390, respectively; see the examples for details; these are currently experimental features
-exchange-correlation functionals with Laplacian terms now working; this includes the deorbitalised functionals of Mejia-Rodriguez and Trickey, Phys. Rev. B 98, 115161 (2018)
-improved the meta-GGA partial deorbitalisation: it now works with the complete range of kinetic energy density functionals in Libxc (see arXiv:2304.02363)
-improved the interface to Libxc
-removed potential-only meta-GGA functionals
-time-dependent Kohn-Sham states are now orthogonlised using a singular value decomposition every 'ntsorth' time-steps in order to improve stability; the default is 1000 time-steps
-new task 485 outputs the Fourier transform of the time-dependent total current J(ω)
-new input variable 'jtconst0' will, when set to .true., zero the constant part of J(t) before the dielectric function is calculated with tasks 480 and 481
-changed large parts of the code to single-precision arithmetic including Hartree-Fock, RDMFT, OEP, GW and the linear-response functions; as a consequence the code is considerably faster
-changed relational operator symbols such as .le., .gt., etc. to '<=', '>', etc. in line with modern Fortran style
-increased maximum allowed number of files on the RAM disk to 32
-many optimisations and minor bug fixes
-added more and improved existing OpenMP parallelism