Notation and conventions

Usage of unicode characters

DFTK liberally uses unicode characters to represent Greek characters (e.g. ψ, ρ, ε...). Make sure you use the proper Julia plugins to simplify typing them.

Symbol conventions

• Reciprocal-space vectors: $k$ for vectors in the Brillouin zone, $G$ for vectors of the reciprocal lattice, $q$ for phonon vectors (i.e., vectors in the Brillouin zone characteristic of the crystal normal modes), $p$ for general vectors.
• Real-space vectors: $R$ for lattice vectors, $r$ and $x$ are usually used for unit for vectors in the unit cell or general real-space vectors, respectively. This convention is, however, less consistently applied.
• $\Omega$ is the unit cell, and $|\Omega|$ (or sometimes just $\Omega$) is its volume.
• $A$ are the real-space lattice vectors (model.lattice) and $B$ the Brillouin zone lattice vectors (model.recip_lattice).
• The Bloch waves are

  \[\psi_{nk}(x) = e^{ik\cdot x} u_{nk}(x),\]

  where $n$ is the band index and $k$ the $k$-point. In the code we sometimes use $\psi$ and $u$ interchangeably.
• $\varepsilon$ are the eigenvalues, $\varepsilon_F$ is the Fermi level.
• $\rho$ is the density.
• In the code we use normalized plane waves:

  \[e_G(r) = \frac 1 {\sqrt{\Omega}} e^{i G \cdot r}.\]

• $Y^l_m$ are the complex spherical harmonics, and $Y_{lm}$ the real ones.
• $j_l$ are the Bessel functions. In particular, $j_{0}(x) = \frac{\sin x}{x}$.

Units

In DFTK, atomic units are used throughout, most importantly lengths are in Bohr and energies in Hartree. See Wikipedia for a list of conversion factors. Appropriate unit conversion can can be performed using the Unitful and UnitfulAtomic packages:

using Unitful
using UnitfulAtomic
austrip(10u"eV")      # 10eV in Hartree

0.36749322175518595

using Unitful: Å
using UnitfulAtomic
auconvert(Å, 1.2)  # 1.2 Bohr in Ångström

0.6350126530835999 Å

Lattices and lattice vectors

Both the real-space lattice (i.e. model.lattice) and reciprocal-space lattice (model.recip_lattice) contain the lattice vectors in columns. For example, model.lattice[:, 1] is the first real-space lattice vector. If 1D or 2D problems are to be treated these arrays are still $3 \times 3$ matrices, but contain two or one zero-columns, respectively. The real-space lattice vectors are sometimes referred to by $A$ and the reciprocal-space lattice vectors by $B = 2\pi A^{-T}$.

We use the convention that the unit cell in real space is $[0, 1)^3$ in reduced coordinates and the unit cell in reciprocal space (the reducible Brillouin zone) is $[-1/2, 1/2)^3$.

Reduced and Cartesian coordinates

Unless denoted otherwise the code uses reduced coordinates for reciprocal-space vectors such as $k$, $G$, $q$, $p$ or real-space vectors like $r$ and $R$ (see Symbol conventions). One switches to Cartesian coordinates by

\[x_\text{cart} = M x_\text{red}\]

where $M$ is either $A$ / model.lattice (for real-space vectors) or $B$ / model.recip_lattice (for reciprocal-space vectors). A useful relationship is

\[b_\text{cart} \cdot a_\text{cart}=2\pi b_\text{red} \cdot a_\text{red}\]

if $a$ and $b$ are real-space and reciprocal-space vectors respectively. Other names for reduced coordinates are integer coordinates (usually for $G$-vectors) or fractional coordinates (usually for $k$-points).

Normalization conventions

The normalization conventions used in the code is that quantities stored in reciprocal space are coefficients in the $e_{G}$ basis, and quantities stored in real space use real physical values. This means for instance that wavefunctions in the real space grid are normalized as $\frac{|\Omega|}{N} \sum_{r} |\psi(r)|^{2} = 1$ where $N$ is the number of grid points and in reciprocal space its coefficients are $\ell^{2}$-normalized, see the discussion in section PlaneWaveBasis and plane-wave discretisations where this is demonstrated.