Spinbox: tools for many-body quantum systems in a Monte Carlo context

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Abstract

Spinbox is a piece of software that facilitates quantum mechanical calculations relevant to Monte Carlo simulation of atomic nuclei. At the front lines of research on the nuclear many-body problem are a large number of supercomputer-scale simulation codes. These codes produce valuable results but can be hard to understand, especially for those without intimate knowledge of the relevant theoretical methods. Thus, tools that fill pedagogical roles are extremely valuable. Spinbox makes it easy for one to replicate and analyze the computational processes relevant to a Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulation that may be difficult to understand/debug/analyze due to the scale of the corresponding simulation software. Spinbox is written in Python using other state-of-the-art Python modules for numerical calculations. While a number of Python libraries exist that are suited to general quantum many-body calculations, the motivation of Spinbox is quite particular. In Diffusion Monte Carlo methods (DMC, GFMC, AFDMC), the central calculation is the imaginary-time propagation of individual samples of the many-body wavefunction. Although quantum wavefunctions generally must be described by a probability distribution over a basis, DMC imbues particles (within one sample) with classical spatial coordinates. This method is unusual, so other Python packages are typically not set up to do this easily. Furthermore, the  More>>
Developers:
Fox, Jordan [1]
  1. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). Dept. of High Energy Physics
Release Date:
2024-09-02
Project Type:
Open Source, Publicly Available Repository
Software Type:
Scientific
Licenses:
MIT License
Sponsoring Org.:
Code ID:
142174
Research Org.:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Country of Origin:
United States

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Citation Formats

Fox, Jordan. Spinbox: tools for many-body quantum systems in a Monte Carlo context. Computer Software. https://github.com/jmrfox/spinbox. USDOE SciDAC Nuclei Collaboration. 02 Sep. 2024. Web. doi:10.11578/dc.20240902.2.
Fox, Jordan. (2024, September 02). Spinbox: tools for many-body quantum systems in a Monte Carlo context. [Computer software]. https://github.com/jmrfox/spinbox. https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20240902.2.
Fox, Jordan. "Spinbox: tools for many-body quantum systems in a Monte Carlo context." Computer software. September 02, 2024. https://github.com/jmrfox/spinbox. https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20240902.2.
@misc{ doecode_142174,
title = {Spinbox: tools for many-body quantum systems in a Monte Carlo context},
author = {Fox, Jordan},
abstractNote = {Spinbox is a piece of software that facilitates quantum mechanical calculations relevant to Monte Carlo simulation of atomic nuclei. At the front lines of research on the nuclear many-body problem are a large number of supercomputer-scale simulation codes. These codes produce valuable results but can be hard to understand, especially for those without intimate knowledge of the relevant theoretical methods. Thus, tools that fill pedagogical roles are extremely valuable. Spinbox makes it easy for one to replicate and analyze the computational processes relevant to a Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulation that may be difficult to understand/debug/analyze due to the scale of the corresponding simulation software. Spinbox is written in Python using other state-of-the-art Python modules for numerical calculations. While a number of Python libraries exist that are suited to general quantum many-body calculations, the motivation of Spinbox is quite particular. In Diffusion Monte Carlo methods (DMC, GFMC, AFDMC), the central calculation is the imaginary-time propagation of individual samples of the many-body wavefunction. Although quantum wavefunctions generally must be described by a probability distribution over a basis, DMC imbues particles (within one sample) with classical spatial coordinates. This method is unusual, so other Python packages are typically not set up to do this easily. Furthermore, the software has built-in options for nuclear systems assuming isospin symmetry, which can be set up with other libraries but is a nontrivial process to do so. Features: - numerical representation of samples of the many-body wavefunctions, including tensor-product states (used in AFDMC) - numerical representation of many-body operators, including tensor-product operators: general, spin, imaginary-time propagation, etc. - the correct associated arithmetic and algebra, implemented as class methods - classes for representing realistic nuclear two- and three-body Hamiltonians (e.g. Argonne V18, Illinois NNN) - large-scale parallel integration over random variables, crucial for the AFDMC method My goal is to make this package open source so that anyone may use it and contribute to it, particularly other researchers doing AFDMC calculations},
doi = {10.11578/dc.20240902.2},
url = {https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20240902.2},
howpublished = {[Computer Software] \url{https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20240902.2}},
year = {2024},
month = {sep}
}