Hello,
I’m one of the authors of Kwant [1], a Python package for quantum
transport in nanostructures. With this message I’d like to introduce
myself and the package and ask to join the Debian Science team.
I’m a staff researcher at the French CEA, the French national energy
research organization. A Debian user since the days of “Hamm”, I’m
a theoretical physicist by training, but nowadays I focus more on the
computational side of research in our field.
Quantum transport is a subfield of condensed matter physics that deals
with how quantum quasiparticles (typically electrons, but could be also
phonons for example) traverse nanoscale devices. We work at very low
temperatures (a few Kelvin or even less), such that quantum effects are
not overshadowed by thermal noise. Some hope that progress in our field
will one day allow scalable solid-state quantum computation. Others are
more cautious and simply point to the rich physics.
The Kwant code is a Python package that is a collaboration between the
French CEA and the Dutch TU Delft. We released the first version in
2013 and have been, slowly but steadily, continuing to maintain and
improve the package. It has found wide adoption in the international
community: the original Kwant paper has been [2] cited around 400 times,
and the lion’s share of these corresponds to independent research
articles that made use of Kwant. These numbers do not include use that
did not lead to a publication, for example by students.
Since 2013 we have been providing unofficial packages for Debian and
Ubuntu, but I have the impression that the time is more than ripe to
have Kwant included into Debian properly. Eventually, I would like to
see Kwant and some related packages in Debian and available as
backports. Since maintaining Kwant is part of my day job, I can make
a long-term commitment to maintaining the packages in Debian.
The first step has been taken by packaging “Tinyarray” [3] [4], a Python
C extension module that Kwant relies on internally. Steffen Möller and
Andreas Tille kindly helped to polish the packaging and sponsored the
upload to the new queue.
The next step would be to package Kwant itself [5], but since the
opening of the ITP, one further dependency is needed for that: Qsymm
[6].
Once Kwant is in Debian, it would be also nice to add Tkwant, a code
that builds upon Kwant but can deal with time-dependent systems and has
been released recently [7].
Kind regards
Christoph Groth
[1] https://kwant-project.org/
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2926
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886628
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/python-tinyarray
[5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886418
[6] https://gitlab.kwant-project.org/qt/qsymm
[7] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03132
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