Dear FEFF users, I have a FEFF8.4-related question concerning the abortion of the potential module in a XANES calculation for a small molecule in solution. It might not be totally appropriate for the ifeffit mailing list, but the FEFFusers mailing list doesn¹t seem to be used very often. I have looked through the archive, but I haven¹t found an entry with this specific problem. I am trying to simulate the L3-edge XANES spectrum for the linear I3- molecule (I-I-I) embedded in a solvent with O-H groups. In order to simulate the scattering from the solvent, I have put two O-H groups at either end of the molecule with the H-atoms pointing towards the I-atoms (expected charge transfer from I3- towards solvent). The I-H and I-O distances are taken from ab initio calculations in the literature, the O-H distance is well-known and amounts to 0.96 A. It is also known from the literature on similar ions in solution that the H-atoms contribute to the XANES and should therefore be included. I pasted my feff.inp file below. Running this file results in abortion at the beginning of the potential module: ... Number of processors = 12 Calculating potentials ... free atom potential and density for atom type 0 MOVRLP-1 Abnormal termination on processor 8 [n7:09539] MPI_ABORT invoked on rank 8 in communicator MPI_COMM_WORLD with errorcode 512 ... It seems to occur when it is trying to overlap the potentials (MOVRLP-1). I tried including the FOLP 2 0.8 card as suggested for H-atoms in the manual, but this does not help. It seems like the O-H bond <1 A is too small: moving the O atoms further away such that the O-H bond is 1.05 A ³solves² the problem, although this is not what I want. But: moving the H atom closer to the I atom while keeping the O positions fixed, which increases the O-H bond as well, does not help! Also, to make things even more complicated, excluding the H-atoms fully, i.e. putting only two O-atoms at 3.5 A from the iodines, results in the WARNING during the SCF loop that the interstitial potential level lies higher than the Fermi energy (moving the O atom closer to ca. 2 A removes this message). In addition, certain combinations of H- and O- positions give the output ³negative dens² during the SCF loop, for which I checked that FOLP 2 0.8 did not help... It is obvious that FEFF has problems with generating the MT potentials for a small and ³open² system such as the one here. Did somebody encounter similar problems (abortion, Ei>Ef, negative dens) for systems like this? Is there something wrong with my input cards? I¹d appreciate any help. Best regards, Renske van der Veen P.s. I am running the parallel version of FEFF8.4 on Linux *** TITLE I3- XANES spectrum * I L3 edge energy = 4557.0 eV EDGE L3 S02 1.0 CONTROL 1 1 1 1 1 1 SIG2 0.01 PRINT 1 0 0 0 0 0 EXCHANGE 0 0.0 0.0 0 SCF 10 1 30 0.2 1 LDOS -30 60 -1 XANES 6 FMS 10 1 UNFR POTENTIALS 0 53 I 3 4 1 53 I 3 4 2 1 H 3 8 O 2 3 *FOLP 2 0.8 ATOMS 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0 -2.91 0.0000 0.0000 1 2.91 0.0000 0.0000 1 -5.45 0.0000 0.0000 2 5.45 0.0000 0.0000 2 -6.41 0.0000 0.0000 3 6.41 0.0000 0.0000 3 END