# ABINIT : the tutorials

These tutorials are aimed at teaching the use of ABINIT, in the UNIX/Linux OS and its variants (OSF, HP-UX, AIX ...). They might be used for other operating systems, but the commands have to be adapted.

Note that they can be accessed from the ABINIT web site as well as from your local ~abinit/doc/tutorial/welcome.html file. The latter solution is of course preferable, as the response time will be independent on the network traffic.

At present, more than a dozen lessons are available. Each of them is at most two hours of student work. Lessons 1-4 cover the basics, other lectures are more specialized.

##### Copyright (C) 2000-2009 ABINIT group (XG,RC)
This file is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, see ~abinit/COPYING or http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.txt .
For the initials of contributors, see ~abinit/doc/developers/contributors.txt .

Goto : ABINIT home Page | Suggested acknowledgments | List of input variables | Tutorial home page | Bibliography

Help files : New user's guide | Abinis (main) | Abinis (respfn) | Mrgddb | Anaddb | AIM (Bader) | Cut3D | Optic | Mrgscr

Before following the tutorials, you should have read the "new user's guide", as well as the pages 1045-1058 of the paper "Iterative minimization techniques for ab initio total-energy calculations: molecular dynamics and conjugate gradients", by M.C. Payne, M.P. Teter, D.C. Allan, T.A. Arias and J.D. Joannopoulos, Rev. Mod. Phys. 64, 1045 (1992) or, if you have more time, you should browse through the Chaps. 1 to 13 , and appendices L and M of the book Electronic Structure. Basic Theory and Practical Methods. R. M. Martin. Cambridge University Press (2004) ISBN 0 521 78285 6. The latter reference is a must if you have not yet used another electronic structure code or a Quantum Chemistry package.

After the tutorial, you might find useful to learn about the tests cases contained in directories ~abinit/test/fast, ~abinit/test/v1, ~abinit/test/v2, ~abinit/test/v3, ~abinit/test/v4 and ~abinit/test/v5, that provide many example input files. You should have a look at the README files of these directories.

Additional informations can be found in the ~abinit/doc directory, including the description of the ABINIT project, guide lines for developpers, more on the use of the code (tuning) ...

### Index

Basic lessons :
lesson 1, lesson 2, lesson 3, lesson 4

Specialized lessons (except response functions):
spin, GW1, GW2, TDDFT, Polarization and finite electric field, Analysis Tools, PAW1, PAW2, LDA+U, Wannier90, ABINIP, Source code

Specialized lessons (response functions):
Response-Function 1, Response-Function 2, Optic, Electron-phonon interaction, Elastic properties, Static non-linear properties (+finite electric field)

### Brief description of each lesson's content :

The lessons 1-4 present the basic concepts, and form a global entity : you should not skip one of these.

* The lesson 1 deals with the H2 molecule : get the total energy, the electronic energies, the charge density, the bond length, the atomisation energy

* The lesson 2 deals again with the H2 molecule : convergence studies, LDA versus GGA

* The lesson 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 lesson 4 deals with crystalline aluminum (a metal), and its surface: occupation numbers, smearing the Fermi-Dirac distribution, the surface energy, and again, convergence studies ...

Other lessons present more specialized topics.

There is a group of lessons that can be started without any other prerequisite than the lessons 1 to 4, and that you can pick at random:

* The lesson on spin in ABINIT presents the properties related to spin : spin-polarized calculations and spin-orbit coupling.

* The first lesson on GW deals with the computation of the quasi-particule band gap of Silicon (semiconductor), in the GW approximation (so, much better than the Kohn-Sham LDA band structure), with a plasmon-pole model

* The first lesson on GW deals with the computation of the quasi-particule band structure of Aluminum, in the GW approximation (so, much better than the Kohn-Sham LDA band structure) without plasmon-pole model

* The lesson on TDDFT deals with the computation of the excitation spectrum of finite systems, thanks to the Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory approach, in the Cassida's formalism.

*The lesson on polarization and finite electric field deals with the computation of the polarization of an insulator (e.g. ferroelectric, or dielectric material) thanks to the Berry phase approach, and also presents the computation of materials properties in the presence of a finite electric field (also thanks to the Berry phase approach.

* The lesson on Analysis Tools deals with the use of the CUT3D utility to analyse wavefunctions and densities, and their graphical representation using Open DX.

* The lesson on the use of PAW (PAW1) presents the Projector-Augmented Wave method, implemented in ABINIT as an alternative to norm-conserving pseudopotentials, with a sizeable CPU time advantage.

* The lesson on the generation of PAW atomic data files (PAW2) presents the generation of atomic data for use with the PAW method.

* The lesson on Wannier90 deals with the Wannier90 library to obtain Maximally Localized Wannier Functions.

* The lesson on ABINIP presents the use of basic parallelism in ABINIT

* The lesson "Source code" introduces the user to the development of new functionalities in ABINIT : in this lesson, one teaches how to add a new input variable ...

There is an additional group of lessons on response functions (phonons, optics, dielectric constant, electron-phonon interaction, elastic response, non-linear optics, Raman coefficients, piezoelectricity ...), for which some common additional information are needed :

* The lesson Response-Function 1 (RF1) presents the basics of response-functions within ABINIT. The example given is the study of dynamical and dielectric properties of AlAs (an insulator) : phonons at Gamma, dielectric constant, Born effective charges, LO-TO splitting, phonons in the whole Brillouin zone. The creation of the "Derivative Data Base" (DDB) is presented.

* The lesson Response-Function 2 (RF2) presents the analysis of the DDBs that have been introduced in the preceeding lesson RF1. The computation of the interatomic forces and the computation of thermodynamical properties is an outcome of this lesson.

The additional information given by lesson RF1 opens the door to

* The lesson on Optic, the utility that allows to obtain the frequency dependent linear optical dielectric function and the frequency dependent second order nonlinear optical susceptibility, in the simple "Sum-Over-State" approximation.

The additional information given by lesson RF1 and RF2 opens the door to a group of lessons that can be followed independently of each other :

* The lesson on the electron-phonon interaction presents the use of the utility MRGKK and ANADDB to examine the electron-phonon interaction and the subsequent calculation of superconductivity temperature (for bulk systems).

* The lesson on the elastic properties presents the computation with respect to the strain perturbation and its responses : elastic constants, piezoelectricity.

* The lesson on static non-linear properties presents the computation of responses beyond the linear order, within Density-Functional Perturbation Theory (beyond the simple Sum-Over-State approximation) : Raman scattering efficiencies (non-resonant case), non-linear electronic susceptibility, electro-optic effect. Comparison with the finite field technique (combining the computation of linear response functions with finite difference calculations), is also provided.

The following topics should be covered later :

* the choice of pseudopotentials

NOTE that not all functionalities of ABINIT are covered by these tutorials. For a complete list of functionalities, please see the directory ~abinit/doc/features . For examples on how to use these functionalities, please see the ~abinit/tests directories, and their accompanying README files.

Goto : ABINIT home Page | Suggested acknowledgments | List of input variables | Tutorial home page | Bibliography

Help files : New user's guide | Abinis (main) | Abinis (respfn) | Mrgddb | Anaddb | AIM (Bader) | Cut3D | Optic | Mrgscr