From friedman@tammy.harvard.edu Thu Jan 14 08:05:52 1993 Date: Thu, 14 Jan 93 13:05:52 -0500 From: friedman@tammy.harvard.edu (Dawn Friedman) Message-Id: <9301141805.AA13614@tammy.harvard.edu> To: chemistry@ccl.net Subject: convergence failure I'm using G88 to do UHF calculations with a large basis set on some alkali oxides. I'm feeling out a reaction path using single-point calculations (optimizations to come later.) Some of these single points give me a convergence failure in SCF, although an energy is reported first. 1) Does this energy have any meaning? 2) Why should one geometry converge, while another, differing only by the C_inf_v symmetry being broken (180 -> 179.9 degrees) does not? The energies are identical. Sometimes the nonlinear version will converge where the linear did not. 3) Can I work around this problem and still have useful results? Is there some method a bit less sweeping than the SLEAZY keyword for getting SCF convergence? Unfortunately, I can't afford to do SCF=qc -- they take too long and often don't converge anyway. --Dawn