<p>This talk is concerned with ab initio crystal structure relaxation under a fixed unit cell volume, which is a step in calculating the static equations of state and forms the basis of thermodynamic property calculations for materials. The task can be formulated as an energy minimization with a detrminant constraint. Widely used line minimization-based methods lack both efficiency and convergence guarantees due to the nonconvex nature of the feasible region as well as the significant differences in the curvatures of the potential energy surface with respect to atomic and lattice components. To this end, we propose a projected gradient descent algorithm named PANBB. It is equipped with (i) search direction projections onto the tangent spaces of the nonconvex feasible region for lattice vectors, (ii) distinct curvature-aware initial trial step sizes for atomic and lattice updates, and (iii) a nonrestrictive line minimization criterion as the stopping rule for the inner loop. It can be proved that PANBB favors theoretical convergence to equilibrium states. Moreover, it normally converges on all the systems, manifesting its unparalleled robustness. The results are consistent with the previous calculations and are further validated by experimental thermodynamic data.</p>
