Dear Prof. Giovanni, 

Thank you very much for taking time and replying in detail and explaining 
things. 

I have indeed gone through tutorials and examples and produced thing very well 
using the well established Quantum Espresso code. 
However, here I am trying to reproduce the phonon frequencies using 
diagonalizing the q-dependent dynamical matrices. After checking I realized 
that I was missing the Square root (SQRT) function of eigenvalues which now I 
incorporate in my code. I am attaching the figure here (middle figure in the 
figure attached). Now we can see that both the bands (the lowest point) are 
almost on the same level. Indeed as you righteously pointed out that there 
could be some other factor, such as, mass factor, be involved which brings in a 
little discrepancy in higher frequency regions. 

As I came to know from the documentations and literature that the mass factor 
is already incorporated in the q-dependent matrix elements calculated using 
Fourier transform of Force constant matrices, therefore I have a suspicion that 
it is the mass factor which brings the mismatch in the dispersion. I also 
looked into the source code but did not find the mass factor involved while 
collecting frequency data. 

Additionally, after a careful inspection and found that the matrix elements 
have the units of Ry/au^2 (energy/length^2) and when I take the SQRT of matrix 
elements I should also take a SQRT of the energy in cm^-1 (Ry--> cm^-1). So now 
the frequencies should be SQRT[eigenvalue (in Ry) of Matrix x 109737] . This 
gives me the rightmost figure. Now it looks like that the the frequencies are 
almost matching but not exactly identical. I doubt that length^2 (au = 
0.529x10^-10 m^-1) and mass (AMU = 9.31 x 10^-31 kg) could remedy this mismatch 
here. 

I would appreciate any comment. 

Thank you, 
Shubham 


From: "Giovanni Cantele" <[email protected]> 
To: "Quantum ESPRESSO users Forum" <[email protected]> 
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2025 2:29:37 PM 
Subject: Re: [QE-users] unit mismatch between PH generated frequencies and 
manually generated eigenvalues 

Dear Shubham, 
I will add a little contribution to the discussion. Prior to it, I would 
strongly recommend, as it has been correctly pointed out, that before doing ANY 
calculation 
you become aware (using tutorials, textbooks and so on) about exactly what you 
are calculating, what are the units, and so on. In many cases (but I do not 
know if 
this is your case!), skipping a necessary initial (self!) training produces 
much more waste of time than spending time in understanding how things work. 

After inspection of the plots you sent, it seems that the problem you have is 
other than a magnitude mismatch. Indeed, a magnitude mismatch is just 
a scaling factor, all the bands get multiplied by 10 or 100 or any odd factor 
that might be obtained by combinations of Ry = 13.6 eV, bohr radius and any 
other relevant scale unit might apply in this case. 

What I simply tried is to superimpose the two phonon band structures and to 
stretch one to try to make it overlap with the other. No success in doing that. 
Effectively, you could for example look at the 6th band. The one on the left is 
almost flat, the one on the right is not. Moreover, in the left plot its 
maximum is 
maybe the small dip at the x-axis center, whereas on the right there are two 
pronounced maxima around the x-axis extrema. As further proof, the 7-th band 
shares a frequency range with the 6th one on the right, whereas in the left the 
two are separated by a small gap. 
So, I would conclude that the two band structures do not differ by a scaling 
factor and are, for some reason, definitely different! This is also confirmed 
by the s 
econd image you sent, with three plots. In that case, the right plot was 
obtained after multiplying the middle one by a factor and indeed the two band 
structures 
look identical, apart from the y-axis scale. 

How could it happen? Some possible answers: 
i) you diagonalized a wrong matrix (for example: did you properly include the 
mass factors?) 
ii) you are not plotting the same quantity. If I'm not wrong, and there is not 
just a scaling factor between left and right, could it be that for example 
when you make the diagonalization you get the squares of the frequencies, which 
would explain the NOT UNIFORM stretching of one band structure with respect to 
the other? This or similar things can explain your issue if you diagonalized 
the matrix by hand, not of course if the diagonalization was produced 
by a quantum-espresso executable, where units are correctly fixed. 

So, the suggestion is to start from scratch, trying to understand, at each 
step, what you're doing, which quantity you obtained and with which units. I'm 
pretty sure that 
it will not be that difficult for you to figure out what's happening! 

Giovanni 
-- 

Giovanni Cantele, PhD 
CNR-SPIN 
c/o Dipartimento di Fisica 
Universita' di Napoli "Federico II" 
Complesso Universitario M. S. Angelo - Ed. 6 
Via Cintia, I-80126, Napoli, Italy 
[ mailto:[email protected] | e-mail: [email protected] ] 
Phone: +39 081 676910 
Skype contact: giocan74 

ResearcherID: [ http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-1951-2009 | 
http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-1951-2009 ] 
Web page: [ https://sites.google.com/view/giovanni-cantele/home | 
https://sites.google.com/view/giovanni-cantele/home ] 


Il giorno mar 8 apr 2025 alle ore 17:03 Shubham Patel < [ 
mailto:[email protected] | [email protected] ] > ha scritto: 


Dear developers and users, 

I am trying to calculate the frequencies (freqs) using Quantum Espresso PHonon 
calculations as well as using dynamical matrices generated using matdyn.x. I 
find that there is a unit mismatch in the freqs which gives rise to a magnitude 
difference. In the first case, I calculate phonon band structure using matdyn.x 
--> plotband.x. While in the second case I generate dynamical matrices using 
matdyn.x and then diagonalize the matrices along the kpath and generated 
exactly same band dispersion except the magnitude on the y-axis (frequency 
range). Could anyone please tell what is this factor which brings the magnitude 
mismatch? I am also attaching a figure to compare. 

Thank you very much for any help. 

Sincerely, 
Shubham_______________________________________________________________________________
 
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