<div dir="ltr">Hi, that makes it more clear. As I am not 100% sure what is going on I will have to do some guesswork. From your input you run an unrestricted calculation. In the atomic guess, CP2K still uses the restricted atomic orbitals as initial guess for both alpha and beta. This might lead to a situation where you have 0.5 of an electron initially sitting in the orbital affected by the U correction. As far as I remember te U correction is symmetric at this point and it might be arbitrary whether the orbital gets further filled or emptied due to the penalty function (therefore there is some arbitraryness in your result). I think this is somewhat general that the U term can lock you in a given state depending on your initial guess. Could you try to use a broken symmetry guess in your calculation where you initialize O as 2- and Ce as 4+ and see how the energy is affected? For O this chould look like &BS &ALPHA L 1 N 2 NEL 2 &END &BETA L 1 N 2 NEL 2 &END &END For Ce it is a bit more complicated. simply remeber, that cp2k puts a closed shell wfn in alpha and beta. Therefore NEL in this case is 2 as the closed shell representation of a 2p3 is a 2p6 wfn. Hope that helps Flo </div>