There is still a numerical instability in the program that it
would be good to fix.  It shows up especially in the s channel
for the case of Pb in the input_examples directory, and shows up
in the matrices printed in the output file just after the line
`after transformation', and later as well.  Basically, this
transformation is determined (by subroutine scpgef) in order to:
(i) make the beta functions orthonormal; and (ii), to resolve
the remaining freedom, a unitary rotation is applied to make a
certain matrix 'ttt' diagonal.  This matrix is some kind of
kinetic-energy matrix.  (The idea is to make the first beta look
smooth, the second one more wavy, etc.)

It seems that, at least for the case of the s channel of the Pb
example, this ttt matrix has a lot of numerical instability
associated with it.  If ttt is printed out, it is seen to depend
supersensitively on all kinds of strange things: the degree of
convergence of the previous all-electron calculation, whether
the calculation is run on a Sun or a Dec Alpha, etc.  Thus, the
unitary transformation, and other subsequently determined
quantities, also have this supersensitive dependence.

Luckily, the choice of this unitary rotation has no influence at
all on the actual action of the ultrasoft pseudopotential; one
really gets the same potential, just with a different internal
representation.  Moreover, the nasty ttt matrix is never used
for any other purpose than for determining this unitary
transformation.  Thus, this `bug' is really benign.

Still, it does make it problematic to compare the outputs of
two different runs that ought to give the same results, and
so it probably ought to be fixed.  Here is what I learned so far.
The problem appears to come because the chi function is noisy,
especially at small radii.  Try printing out a list of slopes
(chi(i+1)-chi(i))/(r(i+1)-r(i)) for i=1,20 and you will see what
I mean.  When calculating matrix elements of ttt, the numerical
second derivative of chi is taken using a spline fit, and this
seems to aplify the noise a lot.  I guess the computation of the
ttt matrix is dominated by this noise in the case of the s channel
of Pb, but the noise seems to be there in other cases as well.

As far as I can tell, the noise in chi comes from the call to
`difinv' in subroutine `scpgef'.  It looks to me as though the
inputs to difinv are pretty smooth, but the output is noisy.
I don't recall the details of what difinv is supposed to be
trying to do, and I ran out of time to work on this.  So I'm
leaving it alone for now; but I would very much appreciate it
if somebody else could follow up on this and fix it.  To get
started, you may wish to uncomment the comment lines surrounded
by `CCCCCCC' in scpgef to see what is going on.

					David Vanderbilt
					20 August 1997