Extracting Position Matrices

In ABACUS, we provide the INPUT keyword out_mat_r to write the position matrices into a file named data-rR-tr in the directory OUT.${suffix}. The position matrices is defined as:

\[\langle \chi_\mu|\hat{r}|\chi_\nu\rangle\]

This functionality is not available for gamma_only calculations. If you want to use it in gamma_only calculations, you should turn off gamma_only, and explicitly specifies that gamma point is the only k point in the KPT file.

Each file or each section of the appended file starts with “STEP: ” followed by the current ion/md step, then the second line starts with “Matrix Dimension of \(r(R)\): ” followed by the dimension of the matrix, and the third line starts with “Matrix number of \(r(R)\): ” followed by the matrix number. The rest of the format is arranged into blocks, such as:

-5 -5 -5    //R (lattice vector)
...
-5 -5 -4    //R (lattice vector)
...
-5 -5 -3    //R (lattice vector)

Each block here contains the matrix for the corresponding cell. There are three columns in each block, giving the matrix elements in x, y, z directions, respectively. There are altogether nbasis * nbasis lines in each block, which emulates the matrix elements.

In molecular dynamics (MD) calculations, if out_app_flag is set to true, then data-rR-tr is written in an append manner. Otherwise, output files will be put in a separate directory, matrix, and named as $x_data-rR-tr, where $x is the number of MD step. In addition, The output frequency is controlled by out_interval. For example, if we are running a 10-step MD with out_interval = 3, then $x will be 0, 3, 6, and 9.