The criterion for choosing is that it be
close to, but larger than, the machine precision[161]
.
I have found that pushing
too close to
(or smaller) does affect the quality of
the returned eigenvector
from the recipe in the
previous section.
One simple measure of this is the difference
,
which should be zero.
For
I found
while
for
it drops to
.
It is unknown how the contamination by other (error) eigenvectors varies
with
.
However I believe that since the errors
mainly occur in the evaluation of small eigenvalue/eigenvector pairs of
,
any contamination is mainly by harmless (null-space) vectors.
On the other hand, also provides an approximate lower bound
for the tension that can be reported.
Therefore, in order to preserve the full depth of the tension minima,
as small an
as possible should be used.
In practice, tension minima rarely are smaller than
using RPWs,
but with better basis sets they can reach typical values of
in systems under investigation.
A choice of
has proved optimal for calculations in
this and the next chapter.