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General Questions and Answers / Re: Question about Defect Diffusion Workflow Template
« on: October 1, 2025, 16:45 »
Hello,
We have looked into the vibrational correction issues in your charged point defect simulations.
- In the Charged Point Defect Analyzer – if you unclick “Include vibrations”, you will be able to see trap levels without vibrational corrections.
- The error is related to the fact that you have negative frequencies (for B reference/elemental material, look for this warning: “There are 973 non-positive eigenmodes”). And if you do have negative frequencies, you can't calculate the vibrational DOS, and therefore you can't work out vibrationally corrected formation energies and trap levels.
-Now the question is why you have got negative frequencies. The geometry optimization of reference material with your MTP didn’t converge, and doing phonon calculations on an under-optimized structure is not a good idea.
- How to solve this? There are two options
1. When training an MTP, you need to include elemental B material and some displacements into the training data set. Did you use the PBE functional for generating training dataset?
2. Try using a universal MACE NN potential for vibrational corrections and pre-relaxation instead of the MTP and evaluate the results.
Another thing we have noticed, that your NEB was not converged in many cases within 200 steps and these NEB calculations for diffusion take long time (formation energies/trap levels were done within a couple of hours), explaining long simulation time that you mentioned. We will think about this problematic NEB convergence in your case.
Hope, this helps.
Best regards, Vaida
We have looked into the vibrational correction issues in your charged point defect simulations.
- In the Charged Point Defect Analyzer – if you unclick “Include vibrations”, you will be able to see trap levels without vibrational corrections.
- The error is related to the fact that you have negative frequencies (for B reference/elemental material, look for this warning: “There are 973 non-positive eigenmodes”). And if you do have negative frequencies, you can't calculate the vibrational DOS, and therefore you can't work out vibrationally corrected formation energies and trap levels.
-Now the question is why you have got negative frequencies. The geometry optimization of reference material with your MTP didn’t converge, and doing phonon calculations on an under-optimized structure is not a good idea.
- How to solve this? There are two options
1. When training an MTP, you need to include elemental B material and some displacements into the training data set. Did you use the PBE functional for generating training dataset?
2. Try using a universal MACE NN potential for vibrational corrections and pre-relaxation instead of the MTP and evaluate the results.
Another thing we have noticed, that your NEB was not converged in many cases within 200 steps and these NEB calculations for diffusion take long time (formation energies/trap levels were done within a couple of hours), explaining long simulation time that you mentioned. We will think about this problematic NEB convergence in your case.
Hope, this helps.
Best regards, Vaida
