  High pressure structural distortions of the hexagonal close packed (hcp)
element zinc have been a subject of controversy. Earlier experimental results
and theory showed a large anomaly in lattice strain with compression in zinc at
about 10 GPa which was explained theoretically by a change in Fermi surface
topology. Later hydrostatic experiments showed no such anomaly, resulting in a
discrepancy between theory and experiment. We have computed the compression and
lattice strain of hcp zinc over a wide range of compressions using the
linearized augmented plane wave (LAPW) method paying special attention to
k-point convergence. We find that the behavior of the lattice strain is
strongly dependent on k-point sampling, and with large k-point sets the
previously computed anomaly in lattice parameters under compression disappears,
in agreement with recent experiments.
