YPP avehole produces no volumetric XSF/Cube output for a large 2D conjugated system
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2026 11:50 am
I am observing a reproducible issue with the YPP avehole + wavefunction real-space output for a relatively large periodic 2D conjugated organic framework (72 atoms/unit cell, referred to as TpPa-1 in my calculations).
I first observed the problem with Yambo/YPP 5.2.4 on the DTU cluster. I then repeated the same calculation using my own Yambo/YPP 5.3.0 installation, and obtained the same behaviour.
For this system, YPP successfully reads the BSE eigenstates, constructs a 75 × 75 × 12 real-space mesh, processes the requested excitonic state, reaches 3D Plot [100%], and terminates with Game Over.
However:
avehole + Format="c" produces no volumetric Gaussian-Cube grid;
avehole + Format="x" produces no DATAGRID_3D.
As an A/B control, using the same BSE calculation, same excitonic state, same FFTGvecs=30 Ry, and the same real-space mesh, but replacing avehole with a fixed hole position:
fixed-hole + Cube produces a complete standard Gaussian Cube;
fixed-hole + XSF produces a complete standard ASCII XSF with DATAGRID_3D.
Therefore, the BSE database, wavefunctions, FFT grid and the general XSF/Cube output routines appear to be functional. The failure seems specifically associated with the avehole real-space-output path.
The YPP report for the larger system shows approximately:
154923 wavefunction components
1536 BSS eigenstates
I also tested the small official hBN-2D example. In that case, avehole does generate non-empty real-space data. However, with the DTU YPP 5.2.4 build (MPI + OpenMP + SLK + HDF5_MPI_IO), files requested with Format="x" or Format="c" are written as HDF5 containers with .xsf / .cube extensions, rather than standard ASCII XSF / Gaussian-Cube files. The corresponding real-space datasets (xsf_values / cube_values) are present and non-empty.
I would therefore like to ask:
Is there any known issue or size-related limitation in the avehole real-space-density path?
Could the behaviour depend on the number of BSE transitions/eigenstates?
Is there a recommended alternative way to obtain averaged electron/hole densities from an existing BSE calculation?
For the hBN case, is the HDF5-backed .xsf/.cube output expected with an HDF5 MPI I/O build?
I first observed the problem with Yambo/YPP 5.2.4 on the DTU cluster. I then repeated the same calculation using my own Yambo/YPP 5.3.0 installation, and obtained the same behaviour.
For this system, YPP successfully reads the BSE eigenstates, constructs a 75 × 75 × 12 real-space mesh, processes the requested excitonic state, reaches 3D Plot [100%], and terminates with Game Over.
However:
avehole + Format="c" produces no volumetric Gaussian-Cube grid;
avehole + Format="x" produces no DATAGRID_3D.
As an A/B control, using the same BSE calculation, same excitonic state, same FFTGvecs=30 Ry, and the same real-space mesh, but replacing avehole with a fixed hole position:
fixed-hole + Cube produces a complete standard Gaussian Cube;
fixed-hole + XSF produces a complete standard ASCII XSF with DATAGRID_3D.
Therefore, the BSE database, wavefunctions, FFT grid and the general XSF/Cube output routines appear to be functional. The failure seems specifically associated with the avehole real-space-output path.
The YPP report for the larger system shows approximately:
154923 wavefunction components
1536 BSS eigenstates
I also tested the small official hBN-2D example. In that case, avehole does generate non-empty real-space data. However, with the DTU YPP 5.2.4 build (MPI + OpenMP + SLK + HDF5_MPI_IO), files requested with Format="x" or Format="c" are written as HDF5 containers with .xsf / .cube extensions, rather than standard ASCII XSF / Gaussian-Cube files. The corresponding real-space datasets (xsf_values / cube_values) are present and non-empty.
I would therefore like to ask:
Is there any known issue or size-related limitation in the avehole real-space-density path?
Could the behaviour depend on the number of BSE transitions/eigenstates?
Is there a recommended alternative way to obtain averaged electron/hole densities from an existing BSE calculation?
For the hBN case, is the HDF5-backed .xsf/.cube output expected with an HDF5 MPI I/O build?