[Wien] Controversy

[Gerardo Soto]

Dear Friends,



While the majority of inquires posted here are technical aspects of 
Wien2k and DFT, my question is of philosophical scope.
This is my first participation in this mailing list, so I hope my 
question is not inopportune.


Very recently Kawamura et. al [ APL 100, 251910 (2012)] published an 
article about the synthesis of ReN2. In his article Kawamura state that 
their synthesis “reversed the theoretical predictions”.
I have done DFT calculations on this compound [G.Soto, CONMAT 61, 1 
(2012)], the spatial group agree but the structural parameters are 
different.
Starting from the synthesis of Kawamura I did structural refinements by 
DFT and I found that Kawamura underestimate the nitrogen concentration, 
the compound of Kawamura is ReN3 instead of ReN2.
I sent a comment of my findings to the APL journal. The reviewer raises 
several questions, easily rebuttable, but he also says that the paper 
has "insufficient physics". Under these consideration the paper was 
withdraw from APL.

I don’t known how to handle the “insufficient physics” statement, 
because I consider that the ab-initio calculations are the state-of-art 
of condensed matter physics. What kind of experiences have you had in 
this regard? Is this a common trend of the physics journals?

If you have enough curiosity you can download my paper (pdf) from the 
arXiv server, the link is below. I appreciate any comments you might 
have. Thanks.

Gerardo Soto

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3054